Restrepo (2010)

NOTE: I posted this without knowing that Restrepo's co-director, Tim Hetherington, had been killed in Libya. My Sicilian grandfather, who was sent to fight in World War I, told me he never killed anyone. "I had no argument with those men," he said, "but they wanted me to shoot. So I shot over the Germans' heads, and everybody was happy." My prayer for Mr. Hetherington and his family and friends is that we should all be so happy. In the meantime, I am sure that everyone who knew him will keep his name in their mouths, "familiar as household words," and "in their flowing cups freshly remembered."

In Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington go to Afghanistan and stick close to, as the Internet Movie Database informs with its usual completeness, "The Men of Battle Company 2nd of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team." And watching them dig in, goof around, freak out, sing and cry and stare into space, I found myself caught between the reality that movies insist on and the one I'll never see--and how, as with scenes of active combat, the two of them are so often the same. That is, what I know of combat I know from the movies--but this is not a "movie" (or a TV series, like the excellent Generation Kill); it's a "documentary."

But watching Restrepo is like watching Full Metal Jacket or Jarhead or The Hurt Locker--even Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now, as extravagant as those movies are. Restrepo engenders an interesting confusion: Does it look like a fictional film because I've seen so many, or is it Restrepo's actual soldiers who've seen the same films and have learned how to behave? This may simply be the most hair-raising home movie ever made--you know how you get when someone turns on the camera at the family get-together: one is "on," so one "acts"--up, usually.

But I don't think that's necessarily what happens in Restrepo--actually, I think it's the opposite: the movies have clouded our vision of the real horror and boredom of warfare, and Restrepo brings us face to face with our seen-that-even-though-I-haven't-done-that smugness. This is so much The Real Deal that even that expression sounds phony--as phony as a non-combatant's "understanding" that War Is Hell. The triumph of Restrepo is that it ignores us, chooses instead to let itself be itself. We're just along for the ride, so we better stay out of the way when the shit starts to fly.

The Devil's Backbone (2001)

Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone is an excellent addtion to a strange but compelling sub-genre: Spanish rural/isolated locale Gothic mood-pieces--with children. This goes back at least as far as The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973--although no overt supernatural elements are present in this one, unlike The Orphanage (2007) or del Toro's own Pan's Labyrinth (2006). It may be a mini-genre, but its potency hasn't waned--and The Devil's Backbone may be the best of its type.

Like Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone is set during Spain's civil war in the late 1930s. Looming fascism in both films serves as a kind of specter haunting this corner of Europe, its brutal will always ready to exert itself even on children. But the orphanage of The Devil's Backbone withdraws for a time from the larger world and literally goes underground--and under water, to achieve effects that are at once chilling and beautiful. It's a ghost story, but one that rises to affect the political and personal worlds of the orphans, the left-wing Republicans (the side that Bogart fought with in his backstory in Casablanca--the losing side, as Louis noted) who run the orphanage, and the fascist Nationalists whose unexploded bomb in the orphanage's courtyard serves as a threat that cannot be withdrawn.

There's mystery and mysticism, politics and poetry, all of it mixed in without apologies. The Devil's Backbone may not be as aggressive as Pan's Labyrinth, but its subtleties make it the better Gothic, a world of secrets and regrets, with the strange justice ghosts so often require.

Ballad of a Soldier/Ballada o soldate (1959)

Alyosha, the young World War II soldier in Ballad of a Soldier, and Shura, the equally young girl, meet as stowaways on a train, the war set aside for a moment. The two of them are impossibly innocent, their faces smooth and childlike, shining softly. The whole movie is like this, a simple and beautiful song. The Russian camera loves to sink down so that it can peer upward at its subjects, almost shyly--the effect, though, is not of a demure glance but a fully orchestrated requiem, the sky filling the background, the Earth curving into the distance.

The size of everything around them--particularly the deprivations of the war, the ragged gaping holes and tired faces, rutted roads, the houses turned inside-out--is matched by their big round eyes, gazing at one another--but the soldier wants to gaze at his mother: Rather than accept a medal for bravery, he had decided to take a short leave to fix her roof. The war follows him, tugging at his sleeve the whole way. It's a sentimental film, but so honest in the effort that you're willing to let it shine like the young lovers glowing like Old Hollywood, Soviet-style.

Mafioso (1962)

Sicilian Antonio in Mafioso takes his Northerner wife Marta to meet the family. They sit down and eat and eat and eat. Marta lights a cigarette, and everyone stares--they'd never seen a woman smoke. She explains she likes to have one after a meal, and they all burst into laughter: that was merely the first course. A pile of squid-inked spaghetti comes out, there under the hot sun, and the meal must continue.

Antonio crows his joy at such abbondanza--but for Marta it's just Sicily always giving you more than you really want. And his family treats her coldly, the Sicilian flat look delivered without active malice, just a habit of being. However, they eventually figure out what they want from her--pliability so that they can work out their own schemes--against their own son, no less--so they cozy up and win her over.

Antonio, however, is not excused from the table, and has to take extra helpings, until he himself is dressed and trussed and arranged on the platter for the old men who stare him down by muttering, "honor"--but he has no choice, and thus no honor. Mafioso works surprisingly well as a prelude to the ethics of The Godfather, in which the world beyond Sicily is alien, even the rest of Italy, and the illusion of family masks inherited grudges and dogged greed. Antonio's time away had appeared to him something he'd really made, something he could live in--but on his return he finds that he hasn't made anything, that it had been some silly dress-up game, that Sicily was always the only real thing in his life.

And all he can do is obey and be dismayed, the life he'd prepared as a successful businessman in the comfortable boot of Italy now dry chalk in his throat. You can see it on his face once more at the end, as he takes another walk through his factory, everything still purposefully clamoring, his co-workers still admiring him--never guessing that a miserable, dead criminal smiles at them, holds a clipboard to his chest and disappears into his Milanese disguise.

Isolation (2005)

How to describe Isolation? Imagine if Ridley Scott were all set to direct Alien--then the budget went south. So he re-sets the film on a small farm in the middle of Irish nowhere, and substitutes H. R. Giger's mad-love shape-shifter with, um, cows. Sort of.

The result is yet another British Isles horror surprise. From 28 Days Later (2002) to Dog Soldiers (2002), from Shaun of the Dead (2004) to The Descent (2006), from The Disappeared (2008) to The Reeds, (2009) (and sorry, but only The Disappeared is on Instant Play right now--although all these titles are available from Netflix), it seems the Brits are back, with a vengeance--and a monster or two, and some hauntings and flesh-eaters, and ...

Isolation's director, Billy O'Brien, makes a picture you can hold in one hand--if you're crazy enough to open your palm. In some ways it's the real surprise in the bunch, if only because it's so simple--as was Alien, even John Carpenter's The Thing (which Isolation also resembles), if you look past their budgets--and with horror, sometimes simple is best. O'Brien gives us a few characters, a villain and a surprise or two, sets it on a farm where no help is forthcoming, then lets this nasty little contraption give you the willies, the creeps, the jumpin jives.

As long as you give in to its premise--gene modification (the post-millennial response to '50s radiation-mutation) gone terribly wrong--Isolation provides a good Dark Ride--dark as the inside of an old barn at midnight, sloppier than a mid-Autumn farmyard. It's a triumph of hand-made, animatronic ick that understands that horror's playground lies between the viewer's need to know and the desire to look away.

Ponyo (2008)

It comes as no surprise that the man who started Pixar, John Lasseter, loves the films of Hayao Miyazaki, sometimes called the Disney of Japan--but unlike Pixar and Disney, Miyazaki's medium has always been cel animation, as meticulous as Pinocchio (1940), with an eye for the rhythms of nature--rain, flowing water, wind on a grassy field--and a willingness to work in bright pastels--especially in Ponyo (2008), the most accessible of his films for smaller children. As with most of his other films, Miyazaki invents a mythology for Ponyo, one related to a love for nature, but also--as in the sometimes deadly serious Princess Mononoke (1997) (his only PG-13-rated film)--recognizing humanity's place in nature, as problematic as it can be.

In Ponyo he imagines a kind of Father Nature of the sea, Fujimoto,* who disdains humanity and seeks only to fill the seas with as much life as he can draw from his alchemical vials. But he loses one of his (many many) goldfish "daughters," Ponyo, who makes it to land and becomes more or less human. I will not divulge too much plot; suffice it to say that, although elements of Ponyo might feel like Finding Nemo or The Little Mermaid--or the aforementioned Pinocchio--let alone any number of his other films, as always Miyazaki produces something original, with enough beauty and rushing action--and half-whimsical, half-hallucinatory sequences (the flooded town and boat trip makes for yet another of his unforgettable waking dreams)--to keep children's attention--a tricky feat these days.

At the same time, Ponyo once more explores a recurring motif in Miyazaki: the search for the parent, the child who waits for his or her family to return--but in the meantime also leaves, often on a quest to find a companion beyond the parents. Ponyo becomes a love story, and is told with such exuberant innocence (if that's possible) that all the other loves--the magician/scientist for the teeming life of the sea, the husband for the wife, the mother for the child, the child for the little old ladies in the nursing home (and their love for him)--weave together, all because Ponyo saw her chance and headed for land.

Generally, if one has never seen a Miyazaki film, the best advice is to begin with My Neighbor Totoro (1980) or the startling Spritied Away (2001)--my favorite; but Ponyo (aside from being only one of two Miyazaki titles on Instant Play) works well, again especially for the wee ones, as a glimpse into a world that shines somewhere adjacent to the one we know.

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*Voiced in the English version by Liam Neeson; most of Miyazaki's English-dubbed films feature familiar voices--here the cast includes Cate Blanchett, Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Frankie Jonas, Cloris Leachman, Lily Tomlin, and Betty White.

My Bodyguard (1980)

Please don't make me use the word "'tween" as I recommend My Bodyguard; just believe me when I promise this movie looks at that period between childhood and adolescence without irony, without condescension--instead, almost as a fable, in which Goliath befriends David.

We may have heard this odd-couple/underdog story too often, here in 2011--but My Bodyguard set the modern standard thirty years ago, especially with its excellent cast, beginning with Chris Makepeace (ironic, yes?), who as the set-upon new kid is suitably average--in a good way, the level-headed one who is surprised and confused by the bullying. But the real standouts are the supporting players: Matt Dillon, still in mini-Brando mode (and again, I mean that as a compliment: early on, Dillon was working on a kind of lanky mulishness, half-amused by the world, half-suspicious of it), is the bully. A surprise, because the real hulk in the picture is played by Adam (no relation to the brothers) Baldwin, who in seven years would steal brutal scenes in Full Metal Jacket (also on Instant Play) before moving on to the role he was born to play, Jayne Cobb in the immortal TV series Firefly. (And this, too, is on Instant Play, you lucky person--Can you hear the Josh Whedon geeks genuflect?) But I can still recall watching Baldwin back in 1980 finding a friend and shedding his sorrow--and I was certain he would do remarkable things. Of course, as it often does with the talented, Hollywood fumbled Baldwin for too long. Still, here he is, just a big kid but managing to evoke Lennie from Of Mice and Men, at least in his mute misunderstanding of his place in life.

My Bodyguard lacks some of the snap of other coming-of-age movies such as American Graffiti or A Bronx Tale, but it still provides just enough uplift to make you happy to have survived your 'tweens--darn; almost made it.