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All in all, a really entertaining World Cup. And perhaps it’s because I reside in DC and spend time on Twitter, two of the most futbol-happy environments around stateside, but this felt like the year soccer might have finally broken through in America for real. Time will tell, I suppose. In the meantime, I should do a better job of supporting the MLS. Valar Futbolis!
I believe.
I believe that.
I believe that we.
I believe that we will get what turns out to be an entirely acceptable result in our third group-stage game that, combined with the result between the other two teams, puts us through into the knockout round!”
As USA reaches the second round the hard way, MLS Soccer’s Matthew Doyle offers his tactical insights on the US-Germany match. “Whether it was Klinsmann’s own decisions, or his willingness to listen to others, I don’t really care. What matters is that he made the right moves to get us out of the group. I’m tipping my cap as I type this.”
Next up for we Americans, wily, athletic Belgium, who I feel bad rooting against, having lived there back in the day. Still, to mix my fantasy metaphors, there can be only one — on to Round 2.
As the US defeats Ghana 2-1 in their World Cup opener, garnering three critical points in this year’s Group of Death and revenge against the team that knocked us out in 2006 and 2010, MLS Soccer’s Matthew Doyle explains how the US’s risky rope-a-dope strategy worked. (Apparently, hardly ever controlling the ball was our master plan.) “The US invited Ghana forward, and wanted them to play thoughtlessly. Jermaine Jones pushed up the left real high to hunt the ball, and it worked.”
Of course, we also lost critical striker Jozy Altidore, who only broke out of a shooting slump against Nigeria, and whose speed, if nothing else, is needed to stretch the field. Without him, as this article points out, we’re going to have to bunker. And unless we start playing better (looking at you, Michael Bradley), Portugal and especially Germany are going to eviscerate us.
By the way, you’ve probably already figured this out by now, but Univision is streaming all of the games online for free. Accelerate the work day, work on your Spanish, and watch some very exciting futbol so far, all in one fell swoop.
Update “In their last four games – two friendlies and now the two group stage games – the US have conceded four goals after the 80th minute…They are sloppy in possession down the stretch, and even worse in closing down running lanes. All the precision you saw from this team through the first 80 minutes disappeared over the final 10.”
So Bradley did play better in Game 2’s almost-upset of Portugal…for 94 minutes. Sigh…well, we still have four points — hopefully the high-powered Germans will agree to a gentlemanly draw on Thursday.
The World Cup 2014 groups are announced, and — alongside Germany, Ghana, and Portugal in Group G — the US look to have a tough go of it. The silver lining: “There is actually some evidence that if the group of death doesn’t kill you, it can ultimately make you stronger.”
Ninety-one years after the terms were first agreed to, Germany makes its last WWI reparations payment this weekend. “Hatred of the settlement agreed at Versailles, France, which crippled Germany as it tried to shape itself into a democracy following defeat in the war, was of significant importance in propelling the Nazis to power.”
Put briefly, and while adding a frisson of Funny Games‘ Aryan youths-gone-wild to the mix, The White Ribbon attempts to do for the rise of the Nazis in Germany what Haneke’s Cache did for the French-Algerian conflict. But, at least for me, lightning didn’t strike twice. Perhaps it’s due to either knowing the trick this time ’round or having a greater familiarity with the history at hand, but I thought the allegorical content of Ribbon started out rather didactically, and only got more obvious and belabored at the movie churned along. And, shorn of its historical musings, the story here doesn’t really hold up on its own — It’s mostly just long, meandering takes of (usually) unfortunate things happening to German peasants.
First, the story. The year is 1913, and in the (fictional) village of Eichwald, a German doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown from his horse and gravely injured, apparently due to a tripwire someone — one of the Black Hand? — placed across his path. And before this event can even be fully processed, another tragedy takes place: A worker for the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur) falls through some rotted boards to her death. Yep, Eichwald is having a frozen run of luck like you read about.
As suspicions and recriminations deepen throughout this hamlet, more troubling events ensue. An aggrieved farmer ruins the harvest festival by slaughtering all the Baron’s cabbages. The Baron’s young son is taken by unknown parties and brutally horsewhipped (for some reason, and as in Doubt, nobody ever thinks to ask the kid who did this to him.) Fires are set, folks disappear (or leave while they still can), birds are mutilated, and, perhaps most frightening, even souls are in peril: For example, the son (Leonard Proxauf) of the local reverend (Burghart Klaubner) puts his eternal salvation in doubt by indulging in a nasty habit of onanism. To be sure, this evil must be beaten out of him, and his siblings, as soon as possible. In other words, we must destroy these children in order to save them.
Narrating this tale throughout (as an old man, years on) is the local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), who, as a relatively young newcomer to the village, stands between its feuding generations. When not courting the Baron’s young nanny (Leonie Benesch), he watches the events unfolding in town with growing unease, and tries to figure out who is responsible for all the incidents driving the citizens of Eichwald mad. The problem is, he’s already tipped what’s actually going on in the very first scene of the movie, when he says something along the lines of “This is not just the story of a random German village, but the story of my nation.” Ooh, really? Allegory time.
Pretty soon thereafter, we are regaled with a scene where the Reverend’s children are taken to the proverbial woodshed and unduly punished for their transgressions, real and imagined. Given both the time I’ve spent on this subject in recent years and the schoolmaster’s “time to play German History Jeopardy!” warning in the first scene, this set off Versailles Conference bells and alarms right away, and especially so once these children are then forced to wear white ribbons as symbols of purity. Hmm…who else in 20th century German history ran around wearing armbands? Let me think on it.
The rest of the story pans out as you might expect. For various reasons, predominant among them the Sins of the Father(s), these kids go terribly wrong, eventually even going so far as to attack a developmentally disabled boy (i.e. the local minority in their midst.) Also, for some reason, the movie is constructed like a mystery, even tho’ — even if you didn’t pick up on all the hints in the last paragraph — one of the kids basically confesses to the schoolteacher what’s going on in the first reel. Uh, can we speed this along? Bitte?
I’d like to say The White Ribbon remains engaging despite all of its allegorical ambitions. But it doesn’t, really. When you’re not playing spot-the-German-history as it goes along — Is the Baron supposed to be Kaiser Wilhelm? Are we gonna get a Beer Hall Putsch? Hey, look, Pius XII! — Ribbon mostly just offers long, intermittently interesting digressions on agrarian village life, like harvest festivals, courting carriage-rides and the cruelest break-up of the German pre-war period. (Some of this plays a bit like Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven — A period film, told in period (B&W) style, with then-taboo subjects like incest, sexual assault, and the aforementioned onanism now thrown in.)
Simply put, there’s not enough story to sustain interest in this enterprise without the allegorical content that’s driving the movie. And, since this allegory was tipped in the opening half-hour, I pretty much just spent most of The White Ribbon waiting for all the various little Nazi shoes to drop. Without either the ambiguity or the open-endedness of Cache, I found The White Ribbon on the pedantic and stultifying side, and I can’t really recommend it. It’s not terrible or anything, but it is rather long and uninvolving, and I have to think one of the other Foreign Film contenders probably puts on a better show.
Perhaps part of the reason I enjoyed the film was that I went in with egregiously low expectations. Particularly with Hostel director Eli Roth skulking about the premises — he’s Donny Donowitz, a.k.a. the “Bear Jew,” a Boston-born basterd who likes to go yahd on Nazi skulls with his Louisville Slugger — I went in thinking that this movie would basically be two and a half hours of grisly torture porn — or , in other words, the ear scene from Reservoir Dogs over and over again, made “ok” because the victims are Nazis. But Inglourious Basterds is both broader and more subtle than that. Yes, there’s some of that going on — particularly in Chapter 2 — but it’s handled much more expertly than I feared. (Nor are the victims in question just cartoon Nazis out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but multi-dimensional individuals in a huge spot of trouble.)
And, in any case, the Basterds are really a small part of the film as a whole. Borrowing liberally from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at the start, the movie begins in 1941 France with the interrogation of a French farmer (Denis Menochet) who may or may not be harboring his Jewish neighbors. His interlocutor is the courtly SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christophe Waltz, a bit over-the-top but probably a shoo-in for a Supporting Actor nod) who, in a wide-ranging conversation about milk, hawks, pipes, and paperwork, methodically picks apart the poor dairy farmer like a boy pinning down a butterfly. Then, we meet the Basterds, the elite unit of Jewish soldiers — led by “Aldo the Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt, also playing it broad) — who are kicking ass and taking manes all across Europe. Their dastardly exploits have even caught the attention of the German High Command — including the Fuhrer himself (Martin Wuttke), who wants them dead, like, yesterday. (Speaking of which, the early scenes in the FHQ, with Hitler throwing a tantrum over the Basterds, felt a lot like how I’d imagine a WWII-era Captain America film might pan out.)
Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), meanwhile, is more interested in getting his newest propaganda film — A Nation’s Pride, about the Sgt. York-like heroics of one German sniper (Daniel Bruhl) — the grand opening it deserves in Nazi-occupied Paris. To that end, and on the advice of said sniper (who’s a bit smitten with the proprietor), he looks to book the premiere at a theater run by a melancholy French beauty named Emmanuelle Mimieux (Melanie Laurent). But Emmanuelle, it turns out, is in fact named Shoshanna — we met her earlier in the film — and she more than most has a score to settle with these godawful Nazis. And, like Herr Goebbels, she knows a thing or two about using the cinema to make a dramatic statement…
I haven’t even mentioned the German actress/double-agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), or the dashing British film critic-turned-lieutenant, Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), or Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), the expert Nazi-killer sprung by the Basterds for bad behavior, or military mastermind Gen. Ed Fenech (Mike Myers, distracting but getting to live out his Peter Sellers dream some more), the man with a plan to knock out the German High Command in one fell swoop. Yes, this film is a truly baroque creation. It’s more a collection of loosely-related setpieces, to be honest, and some work better than others (A vignette involving a rendezvous-gone-south in a basement pub is a masterpiece of slowly-ratcheting suspense; the scene where Shoshanna is forced to eat dinner with a gaggle of Nazis feels ten minutes too long.)
Although most of the speaking here is conducted in French, German, or really-bad Italian (it’s all lovely to listen to, by the way — the musicality of QT’s dialogue definitely carries over into other languages), this is a Tarantino movie through and through. We have the long, meandering conversations punctuated by staccato bursts of violence. (See also: Any other Tarantino film.) We have the throwback homage-ridden score (Mostly Morricone, but David Bowie’s “Cat People” shows up in a truly odd spot.) We have the random digressions on “Pop Culture According to QT.” (There’s an extended riff on King Kong here that momentarily took me out of the film.) We have an obvious lapse into foot fetishism (the Cinderella scene, which, imho, doesn’t make much sense given what happens later.) There are, of course, several Mexican standoffs. It’s all very Tarantino, alright.
And we have the powerful ending, which I won’t give away in detail here. [Warning: This rest of this review is spoilerish.] As several characters say in Chapter 5, “the shoe’s on the other foot now.” And it is — After the tension-wracked first chapter, Basterds completely inverts the usual Cat-and-Maus relationship inherent to almost all movies of this genre. The political economy of IB is hardly what you’d call Zen, and if “turn the other cheek” is your moral touchstone, then the ending is deplorable in many ways. (Even Tarantino seems to think so, given that we the audience have basically the same reaction to Basterds as the Nazis do to A Nation’s Pride.) That being said, it’s a weirdly and undeniably intoxicating thing to see the Jewish Basterds being the guys holding the guns for once, and to witness their disembodied, cackling Avenging Angel exult in a vengeance long denied.
After all its Eurocinema-meets-The Dirty Dozen twists-and-turns, Inglourious Basterds ends up being a sort of a Leni Riefenstahl film for the Jews. And, well, propaganda it may be, but you don’t have to be a Tarantino-level foot fetishist to find it at least somewhat refreshing, even exhilarating, to see that boot on the other heel for once.
In mid-1944, the shadow of failed artist-turned-meglomaniacal psychopath Adolf Hitler still falls heavy across the continent, and, even as the Allies gather in North Africa, Italy, and the coast of Normandy, the Fuhrer maintains an iron grip over the oppressed peoples of Europe. As most everyone remembers from school days, Hitler was able to retain his power base in Germany, even amid the darkening gloom on both fronts, by ruthlessly organizing and consolidating the nation’s elite cadre of disgruntled character actors. Some of these character actors (Kenneth Cranham, Tom Hollander) rejoice in their servitude, and serve their Nazi master with an obsequious relish. Some of them (Tom Wilkinson, Thomas Kretschmann, Eddie Izzard) just look to keep their head down (for fear of losing it) and basically play go-along-to-get-along. But some character actors resisted. And as the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, and Terrence Stamp see their various attempts to unseat Hitler fail due to bad luck, poor timing, or compromised plotters, it becomes abundantly clear what they need to achieve their goal of regime change: a lead actor.
Enter Tom Cruise, otherwise known as Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a Catholic aristocrat who’s been shipped off to the now-doomed North African front for his free-thinking transgressions. (The Fuhrer’s resident character actor in charge there is Bernard Hill, a.k.a. Theoden king, and he still can’t run a battle without timely lead actor advice.) Horribly wounded in an Allied bombing raid, Cruise/von Stauffenberg loses an eye, a hand, and several fingers, but — for his service (and his very reputable name) — gains access to the Fuhrer himself, after some machinations by the plotters. As such, leadership of the proposed coup eventually falls out of the hands of the character actor conspiracy and upon him. “I am involved in high treason with all means available to me,” he tells one aide at his job interview, “Can I count you in?” In other words, enough monologuing already! What Germany need now is emoting and stunt work.
If it seems I’m being a bit glib about a story that indirectly involves millions of deaths, untold destruction, and (tho’ it’s only obliquely mentioned at the beginning) systematic genocide, well I apologize. Along with the Titanic-type sensation of continually “waiting for the iceberg” throughout Valkyrie, it’s really hard to sit through the film without recollecting the ubiquitous and consistently funny Bruno Ganz in Downfall meme. (See also the Cowboys, Warcraft, Burning Man, eBay, Wikipedia, Ronaldo, Youtube, etc.) It could be worse, I suppose: For the many citizens out there who see Tom Cruise and now can’t stop thinking “Scientology,” I can safely report that he’s fine in the role — it helps that both he and his character both answer to a higher power (and have a touch of the zealot about them) — and that the accent problem is handled smoothly (a la Hunt for Red October.)
I should say, before this “review” degenerates any further into pop culture musings, that the real historical facts of this story are fascinating. The plotters of this assassination attempt aren’t really visionary idealists or radical bomb-throwers — Hitler had already rounded up or murdered most of them — but the conservative-leaning remnants of the military and aristocratic hierarchies displaced by the Nazi regime. (The 20 July plot is basically crafted by generals and led by Junkers.) And the engine of their coup attempt is ingenious: The plotters almost succeed in converting Operation Valkyrie, Hitler’s last-ditch plan to stay in power should the roof cave in, into the machinery of his demise. Finally, these German patriots get sooo close to their goal that, had any one of several tiny contingencies played out even slightly differently, the history of the war (and its aftermath) would have been irrevocably transformed. As happens surprisingly often, it seems, the fate of the world is a game of inches.
All that being said, I found all of this information equally fascinating while watching the History Channel special after the film, so I’m not sure it really recommends the movie itself in the end. Singer’s Valkyrie is a smart, well-meaning two hours of cinema, and I was reasonably edutained by it, but at best I’d say it’s one for the Netflix queue.
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History has led us to a new crossroad, with new promise and new peril. When you, the German people, tore down that wall — a wall that divided East and West; freedom and tyranny; fear and hope — walls came tumbling down around the world. From Kiev to Cape Town, prison camps were closed, and the doors of democracy were opened. Markets opened too, and the spread of information and technology reduced barriers to opportunity and prosperity. While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history… Now the world will watch and remember what we do here — what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time? Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words “never again” in Darfur Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don’t look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people? People of Berlin — people of the world — this is our moment. This is our time.” |
After stops in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel, Sen. Obama takes his message to the heart of Berlin, before a crowd of over 200,000 at the Brandenburg Gate. [Video | Transcript.] As Der Spiegel‘s chief foreign desk editor put it after the speech: “No. 44 has spoken.”
Well, let’s make sure we all do our part on Election Day first. Still, it’s safe to say the Obama World Tour has been knocked out of the park so far. Between this and Iraq’s backing of the Obama plan earlier in the week, McCain’s chances are, at least to my mind, looking downright dismal these days. And whining about the press, a.k.a. the mythical maverick’s former “base”, isn’t going to right the ship for the GOP. Yep, all in all, things are looking pretty good for November…and beyond.
(By the way, when Sen. Obama isn’t making the case for world peace, he’s also got a pretty sweet jumper.)
“After examining the film the three experts are certain: The find from Buenos Aires is a real treasure, a worldwide sensation. Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history, can from this day on be considered to have been rediscovered.” Ave Maria! The original Ghost in the Machine has been found! Before this and this and this and this and this and just about anything else you can think of in the sci-fi department, there was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and it’s been rediscovered in an Argentine film vault. (Tour Lang’s city here.)
This unearthed original print is rumored to be 210 minutes long, a full hour and a half longer than any version seen since 1927. “Among the footage that has now been discovered…there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic. In brief: ‘Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s most famous film, can be seen through new eyes.’“