I downloaded this little French film from Movielink.com.  This is a nice way to carry a movie or two on your computer to watch on airplanes or in hotel rooms.  It seems to me that downloaded movies are less of a drain on my computer battery, probably because playing them back from the hard drive requires less juice than operating a DVD drive.  So I always drag down a couple when I’m going somewhere.

 

I picked this one up because it stars Audrey Tautou.  It’s my guess the film made it to America for this reason.  A lot of people are Audrey Tautou crazy since her charming film Amelie, a really special movie that broke a lot of molds and made a lot of people smile.  This film didn’t really break any molds, and it’s also my guess that without Audrey’s participation this one wouldn’t have even broken out of France. 

 

The movie does have an interesting mechanism.  The first half of the film is from the viewpoint of Tautou, and is her recounting of a love affair in which she is unceremoniously jilted by the man of her dreams.  The other half of the movie is from the viewpoint of the man, and it’s a completely different story as he is stalked by Tautou, in whom he has no real interest, but who manages to virtually ruin his life.  It’s a clever idea – a rewind and roll forward from the other point of view. 

 

The film was too slow, though.  That’s a complaint I have about many French films.    A character is recounting something that happened in great detail, and it doesn’t flow with the film.  In fact it is not unusual (and it occurs in this film) for a character to tell someone a story that is completely non sequitur to the film.  “When I was little, I had a toy horse… blah blah blah.”  I suppose if you want to get T.S. Eliot about it you might find some symbolism or some kind of parallel to the real situation or some kind of character motivation.  Maybe it’s my American viewpoint.  I want a story to start somewhere, move along and eventually get there with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It isn’t that you have to have every specific occurrence in the film relate directly to the story line, but it should do so at least indirectly.  Even when Rhett Butler is shopping with Scarlet, we’re seeing what kind of person she is and we’re establishing the nature of their relationship.  But when Audrey Tautou tells a bedtime story to her friend’s daughter, I failed to see the point. 

 

In my opinion, this clever film idea is ripe for a rewrite in Hollywood.  I usually balk at that.  Three Men And A Baby was a good film, but not really a great improvement on Trois hommes et un couffin.  And the French Film La Femme Nikita is one of the great films of all time.  The Bridget Fonda remake was not as good, and the TV show is a pale shadow of the original concept.  But in this case, let’s do it.  I like the idea.  Let’s get hold of it, put in some good witty dialogue, and move the story along!

Let’s set the stage.  It’s 1939.  We’re in a rough-and-tumble port in a banana republic, and the deep voice of a ship’s foghorn paints a forlorn canvas behind the mariachi music and the tin-pan piano in the bar.  The ship comes in and pretty Jean Arthur gets off – just to stretch her legs until the ship leaves again.  She finds the local bar and grill, and it’s right next to the airfield.  By the time her ship leaves, she has fallen in love with chief pilot Cary Grant, who wears an Indiana Jones outfit, along with the rest of his crew.  Pistols, broad-brimmed hats and hard liquor make life bearable for these aviation pioneers in this God-forsaken outpost of civilization.

 

The airline business is tough in this exotic but foggy little town.  Grant’s company has to carry the mail nightly for 6 months without fail to get the big contract.  It will bail them out.  They haven’t missed for almost six months, and they’ve only got a few days to go.  But the weather isn’t cooperating.  Tough seat-of-the-pants pilots flying biplanes through typhoons and zero-visibility cloudbanks in high mountain passes with rubber hoses hanging out one side of the mouth for oxygen die like flies as planes crash and burn trying to achieve the seemingly impossible – the contract that will save the company and make them all rich.  It’s not for the faint of heart.

 

On the next boat is Grant’s latest replacement pilot, who, it turns out, is married to Grant’s old flame – Rita Hayworth.  Now the heat and the humidity aren’t the only things making Cary sweat. 

 

Can it get any better than this? 

 

I dunno, but it’s pretty good stuff.  Director Howard Hawks was the master of high adventure.  This is great drama.  It’s emotional but not maudlin.  The dialogue is brisk and humorous but never silly, and the story is as chock full of excitement, adventure, heroism and sacrifice as you can get this side of Errol Flynn.  

 

Four stars out of four.  If you just watched Casabanca, Have and Have Not, and The Maltese Falcon and you don’t know what to watch next, this one would be a good choice.  It’s for real.  Only Angels Have Wings. 

Star Wars proved you could spend a lot of money on a movie and get it back.  It ended a drought about 20 years long in which the movie industry was afraid to do that.  The result was a rebirth for film. 

 

From the beginning of the movie industry, producers have also known that star power was capable of selling movies.  But Lucas put out Star Wars without any really big stars, and took the brass ring.  (No, Harrison Ford doesn’t count.  He wasn’t a star yet.)

 

But today, studios and producers fall all over themselves creating SFX (special effects) CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) and even fully animated features that aren’t about a duck and a rabbit …  They also still use the power of big stars to suck in the fans.  By the time you have big stars walking on Mars being chased by aliens while dodging ray guns, you are supposed to have a bulletproof concoction that will rake in the dough so fast it’s in the black before it goes to video.

 

But it doesn’t always work.

 

So how do you explain movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding or Bend It Like Beckham?  No big stars, no special effects, just competent basic cinematography and relatively unknown competent actors and a wonderful story that makes you realize how great life is and how much you love people…

 

One thing is still basic:  The story has to be good.  A good story will sell a film that has neither the biggest effects nor the biggest stars, and a super-production with a bad story can die a sorry death. 

 

Bend It Like Beckham is one of those heart-warming films that has so much of what a good story is all about, nothing else matters.  You can’t help getting caught up in this great little tale about a talented young Indian woman in Britain who wants to become a soccer star (that’s “football” to you non-Americans) and endeavors to make it go right in spite of her very traditional Sikh parents who have a much more hide-bound notion of how her life should be and a wicked reaction to the idea of her running around on a field kicking a ball “with her legs showing”. 

 

Her partner in crime is actually a pretty big star!  But she wasn’t when this movie was made.  Keira Knightly was the damsel in distress in the blockbuster Pirates Of The Caribbean.  But Beckham came out before Pirates.  So it's like seeing unknown Harrison Ford in Star Wars or unknown Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza.  The entire film was made for 3.5 million dollars – chicken feed by today’s standards, when 75 million is common and 200 million is not unheard of.  Big stars bloat the budget by 5-20 million each before you even stop by Kodak to pick up the film.  But Beckham has made much more than 10 times it’s original investment.  After a meek opening weekend of only about $190,000.00, it began to grow by word of mouth, mostly.  You can count on the fact there wasn’t a lot of publicity in a 3.5 million-dollar budget. 

 

Like it’s beautiful little star Parminder Nagra, who played the Indian soccer phenom, the film finally “showed its legs” and walked through months of hanging around in the top 20 box office successes while jillion-dollar blockbusters came and went in a few weekends.  Now it’s finally gone to video.

 

If that doesn’t make you want to see the video yourself, then let me add one detail.  Right in the teeth of everyone who makes fun of “feel good” movies, I’ll tell you that this is indeed a “feel good” movie!  In my lexicon, that’s a good thing, not a bad one.

 

Just to clear up your next question, “Beckham” is the name of a current British soccer super-star that was worshipped by the girls, and “Bend It” is a soccer phrase, at least in Britain, that has to do with putting some kind of spin on the ball, as nearly as I can tell.  So the phrase “Bend It Like Beckham” is something like a baseball fan saying, “Slam it like Sammy Sosa” or a basketball fan saying, “Dunk It Like Shaq”. 

Brian De Palma earned his reputation with his best-known films: Scarface, Dressed To Kill, The Untouchables, Mission To Mars, Mission Impossible.  His films are stylish and well made.  He is good at suspense, and is a devotee of Hitchcock – in fact has made documentaries about the great one.  He also started buddy Robert De Niro’s career by putting him in a couple of his early low-budget shows. 

 

I just saw Femme Fatale.  I was afraid to watch it, actually.  The name is almost too lurid, and it sounds like somebody is piggybacking on Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction.  But it’s unique.  The title may be a remake but the film is not.  It’s original and a great ride.

 

Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote and siren Rebecca Romijn-Stamos play the primary roles. 

 

Romijn-Stamos is an All-American girl, despite her European-sounding name.  She grew up in Berkeley, California.  At nearly six feet, she is a natural model.  She got her start with Victoria’s Secret, Christian Dior and Sports Illustrated.   She got a few starter parts, including the one in The Spy Who Shagged Me, but her breakout was her romp as slinky blue Mystique in X-Men, a role she reprised in X2.  Her model’s body and good ability as an actress have secured for her a place in Hollywood, probably for a long time to come. 

 

The movie opens with Romijn-Stamos’ character watching Double Indemnity on TV – the 1940s film noir with Barbara Stanwyck as the evil gold digger who buys an insurance policy on her husband’s life from Fred McMurray, then talks Fred into helping her murder the man.  It’s a chilling start for a film that looks like it’s going to be the same kind of story.  It begins with a contorted plot to steal the diamonds – one of those heist things where the mastermind has got it down to the exact minute when each player does his high-tech part.  It all seems to come off, but it goes sideways – at least for the conspirators other than Romijn-Stamos, who makes off with all the diamonds. 

 

Then the movie takes off on a ride through various plot twists, including coincidences, body doubles, impossible mixing of identities and other mechanisms that only happen well in Shakespeare.  But De Palma gets by with it, because the story is always interesting – filled with intrigue and suspense – and because it is tied together well in a surprise ending that is really a lot of fun. 

 

Sexy Antonio Banderas plays down his usually in-control persona, and slips into the spell of the conniving Romijn-Stamos, who towers over him by a few inches.  De Palma doesn’t correct that difference, underlining Banderas’ role as the patsy. 

 

I highly recommend the film.  It’s a lot of fun.

 

 

The Great State of Kah-lee-foa-nia (his pronunciation) has a new Governor.  He’s not a politician.  He’s apparently not on the take – he’s got more money than the rest of the politicians in Sacramento put together.  He ran as a Republican, but he’s not a hard-line right-winger that alienates everyone but a small core of extremists.  He says he wants to reach out – to represent all the people. 

 

He’s Capra-esque.

 

Frank Capra was one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, and arguably the most inspiring director of all.  At Christmas time, everyone watches his masterpiece It’s A Wonderful Life.  We’ve all seen it before.  It’s 50 years old.  But it’s always fresh and it’s always a reminder of the importance of the spiritual side of life.

 

Capra made a lot of other good movies.  The hallmark of his films was a sense of love and spirit and honor, and faith in America and the common man. 

 

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington was a story about a naïve, honest good-guy scout leader who is elected to the Senate.  When he gets to Washington, what he finds is not the hallowed halls of Jefferson and Lincoln, but the cynical world of graft and corruption.  Refusing to play along, he is sorely tested – cajoled, threatened, and deceived until he begins to doubt himself.  But he hangs on to his ideals and wins in the end.  Played by Jimmy Stewart – the same actor that Capra used in It’s A Wonderful Life, Senator Smith is a prototype for the image of Schwarzenegger.  The outsider who says he wants to do it right. 

 

Schwarzenegger’s speech tonight was assailed by at least two commentators I heard on the basis it was too general and idealistic; didn’t contain enough detail and specific information.  But there’s nothing wrong with that, because the ideals, the goals and the purposes, have to precede the details and specifics.  The reason he won is because he appealed to the better side of men – he inspired hope and trust.  You can attack him for being idealistic.  But the people he ran against are anything but idealistic.  They’re hard core professional coin-operated politicians.  Paranthetically, that also goes for most of the commentators, in my opinion.

 

Will he live up to it?  He might.  It’s hard not to believe he’s going to try his best.  But whatever else happens, this election, which has been discounted and attacked nationally as another circus from the land of fruits and nuts, is actually democracy at its best.  It’s the adjustment mechanism we are privileged to have in America.  If we don’t like our leaders, we can throw the bums out!  If you don’t believe us, just watch!  And you don’t have to belong to any special fraternities or special groups to run for office here.  You just have to make enough people believe.  Although it’s been done, it’s hard to make a lot of people believe if you don’t believe it yourself.  As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time.  But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” 

 

There have been good politicians.  There have been politicians that helped.  Let’s hope Ahhnold is one of them.

Here are some trivia questions.  Okay, maybe it’s not really trivia.  It’s history.  And it’s fascinating.

 

1. Who was the man who led U.S. forces to military victory to take California from Mexico during the Mexican-American war in 1845? 
2. Who was the first governor of California?
3. Who was the first Republican candidate for President (didn’t win – Lincoln was the first Republican president.)
4. Who was the first governor of Arizona?

 

They were all the same guy, of course – John C. Fremont; the man after whom Fremont, California is named, along with probably about a dozen other cities, rivers and mountains in the U.S.

 

Fremont’s history is about as stormy and heroic as it gets in the old West.  If someone wrote the story as fiction it would sound like it was artificially manufactured for its incredible proportions. 

 

Fremont’s mother came from a “good family” in Virginia, but she fell in with a vagabond French dance teacher named Fremón  (the “t” was added later by John C. Fremont to Americanize the name).  Her family disowned her.  So she wandered around the Southeast with her lover and bore to him a son, while living in Savannah, Georgia.  Fremón died at an early age, and John’s mother continued to work at odd jobs and support her family.  As a child Fremont was very bright and in his teen years fell in with a mentor named Poinsett, who was a respected world traveler, adventurer and politician.  Poinsett had returned from Mexico at one point with a newly discovered unnamed red flower – so it was called the “poinsettia” in his honor. 

 

Although he lived in the South, Poinsett was an ardent opponent of slavery, and Fremont picked up his views, and in fact had a black girlfriend for a time during his teen years, in defiance of the environment.

 

Fremont began his adventurous adult life as an Army explorer and mapmaker.  His accomplishments in this area are vast.  He led parties that mapped a large part of the area west of the Mississippi.  He found a winter route through the Sierra Nevadas, found the mouth of the Mississippi river, and turned in a large quantity of good work in this capacity.  One of his confederates in those years was the well-known frontier scout Kit Carson.

 

In his travels, he met and fell in love with Jessie Benton, the daughter of another well-known frontiersman/politician, Thomas Hart Benton, the Senator from Missouri.  Considered gorgeous in her day, Jessie Benton Fremont was also brilliant, and would become a luminary in her own right as a writer and reporter. 

 

In the 1840s he was on a mapmaking expedition in California and got word that the United States had gone to war with Mexico.  He and his men decided on their own to go pick a fight with the local Mexican fort.  They won, and proclaimed California as a part of the United States right on the spot.  They designed and ran up the original “bear flag” that is still the flag for the State of California.  He then hooked up with an American Naval Admiral Stockton, who had sailed up the Sacramento River to what is now Stockton, California, and put together an army.  He went through California on the attack and took the state from Mexico.  Two of the primary battles took place right in the middle of what is now the Greater Los Angeles area, and the final peace agreement was signed in Cahuenga Pass, in the shadow of what is now Universal Studios.  Fremont was an enlightened leader, and didn’t ask the Mexicans for anything more than political control but allowed them to go ahead with their lives as before, much to their surprise.  The leader of the Mexican forces, Pio Pico, was convinced he and all his lieutenants would be executed by the Americans.  In the end, many of the “Dons” (a Spanish term that is equivalent to something like a “Lord” or “Earl” – a landowner who had been granted his property by the King of Spain) continued to operate their huge ranches for many years, gradually selling off small parts for cash.  Some of them still lived in huge estates in the Los Angeles area as late as the 1880s.

 

Admiral Stockton appointed Fremont as the first Territorial Governor of California, then sailed off.

 

An Army General named Kearny arrived in California soon after with orders to take the area from Mexico.  Communications were slow at that time, and Kearny was upset to find the job had already been taken care of.  He tried to take over the scene.  Fremont, who gathered a reputation as a hardhead as the years went by, refused to back down or compromise, and the result was Kearny, who had strong connections in Washington, had Fremont taken back to the East and court-marshaled.  Fremont would have gone to prison or lost his life, except for the intervention of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, his wife’s illustrious father.  (Kearny, parenthetically, died about a year later of yellow fever in Mexico during the continuing Mexican-American war.)

 

Disgusted with his treatment by the army, Fremont went back to California as a civilian, did some real estate deals and became a multi-millionaire during the time of the California gold rush, about 1849.  In 1850 he was elected as one of the new state’s first two Senators.  He was nominated for the presidency in 1856 – the first Republican candidate for that office.  The Republican Party was growing stronger in those days as an anti-slavery party.  He lost the election to Southern Democrat James Buchanan, the corrupt and womanizing Southern sympathizer who preceded Abraham Lincoln. 

 

Just prior to the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Fremont as a General for the “Army of the West” based in Missouri.  Fremont, always the pioneer, took things into his own hands immediately, and issued an edict proclaiming slavery illegal in Missouri, then began arresting pro-slavery men and throwing them in jail.  This was highly inflammatory in the highly explosive atmosphere preceding the Civil War.  Lincoln was still trying to prevent the war, so he ordered Fremont to back off.  Fremont refused, so Lincoln fired him. 

 

Fremont subsequently decided to go for broke in the railroad business.  He invested poorly and lost the fortune he had made earlier.  His talented wife supported them for a while as a writer, even publishing her own newspaper.  He had friends in the East who endeavored to help him and he was appointed as Governor of the new Arizona Territory.  He recovered his solvency and retired to New York City, where he finally died at the age of 77. 

 

 

Famous American movie stars from Spain are rare.  I don’t recall any until recently.  Presently there are two that I’m aware of; Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz.  Might they be the first two legitimate American stars from the land of the conquistadores?  They have one thing in common.  They got their start in films by Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodovar. 

 

The last world-class director from Spain was Luis Bunuel, but he didn’t do his work in Spain.  His primary successes were French.  He directed a couple of well-known French classics, Belle De Jour and The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.  But Almodovar makes films in Spain.   Almodovar may be the director who first moved Spanish film onto the world stage.  He already has an Oscar for the screenplay in Talk To Her, a film I have not yet seen, although I now have the DVD in the house.

 

Almodovar’s films take a strong stomach, and most Americans have to check at least their sense of propriety at the door, and maybe their morals too.  At worst, his films are Jenny Jones and Phil Donovan; the movie.  But some of them are real gems.  I first became aware of Banderas in Almodovar’s Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, in which Antonio plays a released convict whose first act upon being released is to seek out a hooker he once had an affair with, played by drop-dead-gorgeous Victoria Abril, an actress who must have done something wrong in the last life not to have broken into the American market by now, unless she doesn’t want in. 

 

Abril’s hooker is strung out on heroin.  Ex-con Banderas decides she must get off heroin, so he watches her like a hawk to help her break the habit.  He can’t trust her on those occasions when he must leave home without her, so he ties her to the bed. 

 

This plot sounds dark, but the movie comes off as a sort of romantic comedy, laced with crime, drugs and various other messy subjects.  Think Quentin Tarantino meets Woody Allen. 

 

I saw Banderas in two or three other Almodovar films and Penelope Cruz in a couple before either of them showed up on this side of the Atlantic.  Banderas made a few American films of greater or lesser importance prior to Interview With The Vampire with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.  He was a fixture in Hollywood as a Latin Errol Flynn well before he broke out in Zorro.  His roles in The 13^th Warrior and the Desperado series have cemented his future star on the boulevard.  Most younger people also know him as the father in the Spy Kids series. 

 

If you want to catch up on Almodovar, pick your films carefully.  Some of them are deadly dull in my opinion – one-room sets and endless dialogue carry you into a slightly unconscious netherworld you used to get to by watching bad black-and-white Swedish and Italian films in the early 1960s.  Besides Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, you can try High Heels and Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. 

A long flight is fine with me.  I call airplanes cybermonasteries.  I enjoy using my computer to catch up on E-mail and other work, listen to music, write and just watch movies.  But there are always periods in today’s airplanes when they won’t let me use my computer.  Compound that with the inconvenience of using one when you’re making a connection, walking through concourses, catching trains and buses and getting a bite to eat, and there’s plenty of time when you need some kind of non-electronic entertainment to get you through.  My usual solution is to buy treeware (a book) – usually a good spy novel or some kind of suspense story.  These kinds of books hold my attention well enough to keep it off the lump in my stomach from the cheap pizza I just ate so I won’t have to eat the soggy turkey sandwich I know they will foist on me when I board on the plane.

 

My selection this time was a Ken Follet novel, Night Over Water.  I’ve read a couple of Ken Follet novels, and I’ve seen some of the movies that were made from Ken Follet novels, including Eye of the Needle, and On Wings Of Eagles – both great suspense thrillers.

 

Follet is English, and the books I’ve read take place in England during historic periods.  Night Over Water is a wonderfully researched suspense/spy novel that takes place mostly on an overseas flight aboard the Pan American Clipper – the incredibly romantic seaplane of the late 1930s.  The Clipper was the first way for the common man to book a flight overseas.  Clippers ran from the U.S. to England and to the Orient.  There were only 12 of them built, and the price of admission was extremely expensive – proportionately more than taking the supersonic Concorde today by several times.  The passage was about the price of a good car.  It was an incredible novelty for the very rich to be able to cross the ocean in an airplane – in 25 or 30 hours.  It didn’t go that fast – less than 200 mph – but it sure beat the Queen Mary. 

 

The luxurious 41-ton flying monster carried 40 people on overnight flights, complete with little bedrooms and a bridal suite, and was designed to land on the ocean – not on land.  The purpose for this design was the complete lack of good-quality long runways in those days.  The planes were deployed in about 1938 or 1939 and only ran for a year or two before WW II started.  After that, civilian travel was curtailed and the planes were used by the military for the remainder of the war.  Roosevelt and Churchill both crossed the ocean in these lumbering behemoths.  By the end of the war, the military had built long runways everywhere that mattered, and the exotic seaplane was obsolete.  Today none remain.  The fascinating details of the design and operation of this marvel are a good enough reason to read the book. 

 

The story is about the fictional “last flight” of the Clipper from England to the U.S. on the day war is declared by England in 1939.  A collection of characters is furnished, complete with great backstories, heading to America for various reasons, ranging from the wealthy Fascist English Lord who had backed Hitler and must now flee from his homeland because Fascists are out of style in England, the American woman who owns a successful shoe manufacturing plant who must get home in time for a board meeting the next day to avoid a hostile takeover, the English woman who has fallen in love with an American screenwriter and is leaving her husband and her home to find a new life, the thief who is jumping bail for pinching jewelry from the rich and famous, and others with similarly interesting situations.  Follet has done a great job of building a story of this type without falling into the trap of making maudlin, petty people who aren’t interesting enough to be in a good story.  His characters are good.  And his perception of human nature is sufficient to make the situations real and gripping. 

 

A spy situation is injected into this pastiche, and the suspense reaches Hitchcock level. 

 

There’s plenty of drama, love, hate, inspiration, heroism and steamy sex to go around.  It’s a great read.  In fact the problem with books like this is I can’t put them down.  I didn’t finish the book on the flight, and I was up much too late completing the story.  I highly recommend it.

 

In the two Follet novels I’ve read, the pretty young noblewomen protagonists were the daughters of rich English lords and were both, in defiance of their lordly fathers, socialists.  This throws me a bit.  It seems Follet has positioned socialism (good) as the opposite of fascism (bad) and might even believe it himself.  If so, he wouldn’t be alone in that. England has succumbed to socialism to a great degree in the last century.

 

A little survey of English history may shed some light on this.  The first step away from the rule of force in European culture was the hallowed Magna Carta, a document that was generated in England in the 1200s.  Look it up on line and read it sometime. It’s inspiring in any case, and more so because of the era when it was generated – well before the renaissance, during the high middle ages – the period of the Holy Crusades – Robin Hood and Richard the Lion-Hearted.  In fact, it was written to rein in the excesses of evil King John, the very man who had been evil Prince John in the Robin Hood story. 

 

The Magna Carta bears remarkable bloodlines to the United States Constitution.  It gave rights to the noblemen and made them part of a greater social agreement, and it limited the right of a king to yell, “Off with his head!” and take away lands and titles without due process.  The stuck point in England is they never extended these rights on down the line.  They were kept in trust for noblemen for the most part, and this privileged class was insanely rich (Follet writes about baronial estates with acres under roof) and treated their servants, employees and suppliers with relative disdain for centuries, really.  This fact alone may have been the biggest factor in the decline of the Empire.  The English class system, better at first than the pure might-is-right monarchy systems where everyone but the king was at the mercy of the king, finally got dusty and rusty in about the 1700s, but the Brits never caught up with the times and took the step to secure rights and freedoms for the common man to the degree it existed in the United States.  The result of the eventual inevitable social outrage was a socialistic movement, beginning in the late 1800s, which finally drug the Great Empire to its knees following WW II.  Follet seems to miss that the opposite of tyranny, whether it is perpetrated by dictators or oligarchic class structures, is freedom, not socialism, which is really only another tyranny.  A man is not really free if he can’t benefit from his own hard work and ingenuity. 

 

Nevertheless, this little foible aside, his novels are well written, colorful, action-packed (but not overdone with clouds of spent shells jingling onto the floors) and heroic.  They are informative and hard to put down.

John Travolta’s film, Basic, is a gripping military whodunit.  It takes place in Panama – a hellhole full of evil things like death, spies, drugs and the U.S. military.  Connie Neilson is his sidekick (or maybe it’s the other way around) and Samuel L. Jackson is the hard case sergeant whose men hate him enough that any one of them might have been his murderer. 

 

In the beginning of the movie there’s a little bit of history.   The French tried to build a canal in Panama before the Americans came.  They were losing as many as 500 workers per day to yellow fever.  They were losing money, and they couldn’t figure out what to do with the bodies.  They ordered big barrels of olive oil, emptied them, and put a corpse in each barrel.  They sold the corpses to European medical schools as cadavers.  It made money – helped to defray the awful cost of the failing project.  This dark little introduction sets the tone for Panama as a location.  It paints a similar picture to the one in The Tailor Of Panama, from the book by John Le Carre with Geoffrey Rush, Pierce Brosnan and Catherine McCormack; a spy story as dark as any of Le Carre’s books.

 

Basic should be seen twice.  It’s a serpentine story, and when the twist comes at the end, you can be left to reassemble the pieces in your mind, wondering what you saw – like the ultimate “twist” movie, Sixth Sense. 

 

The cleanup scene at the end explains, but it should have been edited by Agatha Christie – with the main detective going around the table and orating the true events exactly.  (Like, “Mr. Jones!  You weren’t anywhere near the kitchen!  But you knew you were going to need an alibi, so you put the cheese wheel and the dirty dish in the library ahead of time to make others think you had gone to the kitchen to get them!”)

 

Once you get past the little complexity factor, the story is extremely satisfying.  It’s gritty, violent, and real.  It is also seductive.  It is a story of murder, intrigue and deception. 

 

The incident occurs on a crazy U.S. Army Ranger training mission in Panama that goes bad.  Eight or so Rangers go out, and only two come back.  That occurs up front.  The rest of the movie is about how two sleuths, Connie Nielson and John Travolta, unravel what happened.  As they question the two survivors, each tells a story that contradicts the other.  When confronted with the contradictions, each of them tells a different story, then a different story.  Each of these versions is played out as a flashback with Samuel Jackson and his Rangers, fighting a hurricane and each other, in the cordillera (mountain range) between Panama and Colombia.  Each version gets more fantastic, but somehow closer to the truth. 

 

Nielson isn’t as well known as her co-stars Travolta and Jackson, but she’s very good.  She’s been around; in Gladiator, Mission to Mars, and as the super-sexy she-devil in The Devil’s Advocate with Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino.  But I’d very much like to see more of her.  As far as Travolta and Jackson are concerned, they are as good as it gets – and this vehicle is right down their alley:  a dark little alley behind Mardi Gras-crowded streets in Panama City. 

 

 

Lost In Translation wasn't.  Lost in translation, that is.  It was very understandable indeed, and a very good story. 

That being said, it was a little slow and thoughtful for my taste.  But that is hardly a criticism.  Lots of people do lots of good things that aren't exactly suited to my taste.  I've climbed the highest mountains in Tibet seeking advice as to why everyone doesn't see things exactly the way I do, but I've never gotten a satisfactory answer.

But Scarlett Johansson will leapfrog to major stardom as a result of this film.  She was already known and respected after Horse Whisperer, winning awards at a very tender age indeed.  She was born just last week, or in 1984 or some recent time like that.  But she's good.  Very good.

Bill Murray once seemed to make a career out of being slimy.  I still blanche at the memory of Ghostbuster's Peter Venkman putting the make on the starry-eyed ingenuous young woman, leading her to believe she had psychic powers she did not in fact have.  But Bill can act too, and he aced one of the great roles of all time in Groundhog Day, an uplifting and wonderful movie that will always remain in the Top Ten for many people.

Lost In Translation isn't Groundhog Day, but it's good film.  The first third of the movie is the best.  It's a painfully funny juxtaposition of modern Tokyo's fashionable, plastic, electronic culture with Murray's tired old movie star, making a quick buck as a spokesman for a Japanese whiskey -- a job he doesn't want in a place he doesn't want to be, working with people he can't understand.  The continuing gag with the director spouting multiple lines of Japanese, after which the interpreter whispers two or three words in Murray's ear was rolling-in-the-aisle stuff.  "Is that all he said?" inquires Murray, "It seems like he said more than that."

The movie changes character.  Johansson is stranded and lonely in the same hotel with Murray and eventually they meet and strike a true friendship while touring Tokyo.  They wind up making lemonade out of lemons and having a great time.  Vicariously, we get a little taste of Japanese culture too; from the traditional and religious manifestations to the incredibly colorful Tokyo streets that make the city look like the illegitimate child of a wild weekend fling between Wall Street and Las Vegas. 

It is to the great credit of those who made this film that they avoid crossing the line with the September-May relationship between Murray and Johansson.  The movie was always tasteful, but without losing heart.  It was very real stuff.