For Memorial Day, Bridgitte Rivers and I are finally watching Flags of our Fathers. I generally love Clint Eastwood as a director, but in the first several scenes, this one falls into the same trap that a lot of latter-day WWII movies have: Oh, look, theres another white guy. None of the other characters are saying his name, so hes just another white guy to add to the other 30 whose names I already dont know, and Im 10 minutes into the movie. They more or less all seem like nice kids from Kansas, but I couldnt pick them out of a lineup, let alone a crowded ship scene. During the big boom of WWII movies in the late 40s, the 50s and the early 60s, films benefited from having limited budgets, so there could only be so many white people on screen at any given time. In more recent WWII films, there seems to be no limit to the Caucasianicity employed to create narrative chaos. Films like The Longest Day and, later, A Bridge too Far fixed this problem by seemingly having every damn guy on the screen be someone at least mildly famous, to the point of, for instance, giving Gene Hackman a ludicrous Polish accent rather than hiring, you know, like, a Pole or something. Saving Private Ryan (which I loved, for what it was) took this remedy to an almost absurd point, as did Maliks remake of The Thin Red Line (which I hated). Mind you, Saving Private Ryan also benefits from a very well-written screenplay. But there is also also from this: it opens by brutalizing the audience for 15 minutes. By the time the secondary characters start interacting in ways other than trying not to get violently disassembled, I have been so worked over myself that I bond intensely with every face on the screen. Tom Sizemore! I love you, Tom Sizemore! Hold me, Tom Sizemore! All this talk about white people reminds me I still need to see Miracle at St. Anna.
Posted on: Mon, 26 May 2014 05:43:14 +0000
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