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Four Sophisticated Film Reviews
By Kam
Williams
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Flags of Our Fathers
/
SoulMate
/
Death
of a President
/
Color of the Cross
Flags of Our Fathers
No
Brothers in Fathers
On
the morning of February 19, 1945, in the wake of 74
consecutive days of pounding from the air by B-29
bombers, over 100,000 U.S. soldiers mounted an
amphibious assault on Iwo Jima, a tiny Far East island
about a third of the size of Manhattan. The Marines who
landed there that fateful day encountered mines, booby
traps, and much stronger resistance than they had
bargained for because the bombardment had failed to
soften-up the fortification as anticipated.
The
Japanese had carved a honeycomb of concrete-reinforced
caves 40-feet deep into the face of Mount Suribachi, the
550-foot extinct volcano towering over the isle’s
southern tip. So, armed to the teeth, the enemy
patiently waited underground, afforded the early
advantage offered by a maze of 1500 bunkers
interconnected by 16-miles of passageways.
Further complicating the invasion was the fact that when
the GI’s arrived, they were unable to dig foxholes,
because the shore of the hostile terrain was composed of
black sulfuric ash, a loose, shifting soil virtually
impossible either to walk on or to dig foxholes in. As a
consequence, the Allies ended up stuck like sitting
ducks on the beach, suffering more than a casualty per
minute for the first 60 hours.
Though America did ultimately prevail in this pivotal
battle of the Pacific Theater of Operations, victory
would be prematurely celebrated back home due to a
“Mission Accomplished” photo-op which transpired on the
fifth day of the fighting. That’s when AP photographer
Joe Rosenthal (who just died in August of this year at
the age of 94) snapped the world-renowned shot of a
half-dozen soldiers hoisting Old Glory high atop
Suribachi which would serve as a morale booster for a
populace growing weary of the war’s mounting debt and
death toll.
Two
days later, on February 25th, when the picture appeared
in the Sunday edition of newspapers all across the
country, most readers were unaware that the bloody
engagement wasn’t over. But it would continue for almost
another month, ultimately taking a total of 6,821
Americans lives (including half the men in the famous
print) as well as all but a few hundred of the 22,000
Japanese entrenched on the island.
In
addition, the American public didn’t know that the too
good to be true Kodak moment had been a recreation, not
an authentic snapshot of the historic instant when the
Stars and Stripes were first raised on the summit. When
asked, Rosenthal initially acknowledged that the photo
had been staged and that another flag had been planted
before he arrived, but he retracted the statement when
that admission ignited a nasty backlash.
Nonetheless, the photo won the Pulitzer Prize and
spawned a cottage industry of reproductions of the
iconic tableau including everything from posters to
paperweights to billboards to a commemorative postage
stamp to a silver dollar to a national monument to
propaganda war newsreels.
With
Flags of Our Fathers, one would hope that Clint Eastwood
would have some reason to make another Iwo Jima movie
besides resurrecting the same sort of patriotic claptrap
already dished out ad nauseam in war flicks like John
Wayne’s
Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). But regrettably,
Eastwood chose neither to clarify the aforementioned
photo controversy, nor to edify his audience in any
other meaningful way.
Perhaps the movie’s most glaring omission involves the
absence of any African-American soldiers. No blacks were
featured in any of the early war films from the Forties
and Fifties, and none were awarded the Congressional
Medal of Honor for bravery in World War II, at least
until President Clinton made an overture to correct the
glaring oversight during his presidency.
So,
excuse me for wondering why Eastwood would opt to
perpetuate the myth of Iwo Jima as a virtually
lily-white invasion in these presumably more enlightened
times. Sadly, Clint’s not the only top director guilty
as charged, since Steven Spielberg served up a similar
historical distortion in Serving Private Ryan, and more
recently, Oliver Stone conveniently changed the color of
a Marine hero at Ground Zero from black to white to fit
his vision of 9-11 for World Trade Center.
This
persisting bias has serious implications for the
prospects of the already beleaguered black male, for a
fundamental function of film, ostensibly, is to convey a
sense of a culture’s social structure. And when the
cinematic lens is repeatedly employed to map out
microcosms of society marked by African-American
marginalization, it is very likely to engender real-life
attitudes rationalizing continued ostracism and
exclusion.
Truth
be told, about 1000 black soldiers took part in the
assault on Iwo Jima, including Sergeant Thomas McPhatter,
whose all-black platoon landed on the first day.
McPhatter, 83, who played a critical role in the real
flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, not the re-enactment, is
fed up about being ignored again by Flags of Our
Fathers.
"This
is the last straw,” he complained. “I feel like I've
been denied, I've been insulted, I've been mistreated.
Of all the movies that have been made of Iwo Jima, you
never see a black face. But what can you do? We still
have a strong underlying force in my country of rabid
racism."
During WWII, the Department of Defense directed
embedded cameramen not to film African-American GI’s in
action. Remember, America’s Armed forces were segregated
until 1948. So, any newsreel footage accidentally
containing blacks invariably ended up on the cutting
room floor. But blacks were there, and shed blood in
almost every major engagement of the war.
So
why the reluctance to rectify the deliberately
whitewashed version of history disseminated during the
shameful days of discrimination? Who knows? NYU History
Professor Yvonne Latty says she even urged Eastwood
before he began production to include black soldiers in
the film and sent him a copy of her book about these
forever unsung heroes, but to no avail.
The
upshot is that
Flags of Our Fathers is a 21st Century
version of the state-sanctioned, pro-war propaganda
designed to instill a sense of patriotism in the Baby
Boom Generation back when they were impressionable
babies. The violence may no longer be sanitized, but its
color-coded depictions of heroism remain unchanged.
The
story revolves around a Private Ryan-like mandate to
bring back to the States the soldiers who had erected
the flag in the suddenly-famous photograph. Why? In
order to exploit the vets sudden celebrity to sell
government bonds on behalf of the war effort. This
tedious timewaster’s only tension revolves around a
seemingly meaningless controversy, namely, whether one
of the deceased soldiers holding the pole might have
been misidentified.
With
blacks invisible,
Flags of Our Fathers devotes its
express ethnic insensitivity in the direction of other
ethnic minorities. Thus, Japanese are repeatedly
referred to as “Japs,” while the token non-white GI, Ira
Hayes (Adam Beach), a Native-American, is presented as
an offensive combination of two stereotypes: “The Noble
Savage” and “The Drunken Indian.”
When
not speaking in silly non-sequiturs such as, “Because of
this war, white men will understand the Indians a lot
better,” Ira is portrayed as a lush who never learned
how to hold his liquor. Yet, he supposedly somehow
embarked by foot and by thumb on a 1300-mile journey
from Oklahoma to Texas to inform a grieving mother
(Judith Ivey), in person, that her late son had indeed
been standing alongside him holding the pole in the
famous picture, just as she suspected, as if that could
in any way be a comfort for her loss.
His
conscience cleansed and his duty to his great white
brother honorably performed, Ira subsequently reverts to
the true nature of the red man, drinking himself into a
stupor till he’s found frozen to death in a ditch by the
side of a road.
The
movie’s underlying message, a slight variation on an
age-old theme, is that wars are still fought by brave
white guys for God, mom and apple pie, and that anybody
who would dare to disagree must be a cut-and-run coward.
It’ll
be interesting to see whether Clint tones down his
ethnic animus in
Letters from Iwo Jima, his upcoming
companion piece purporting to present the Japanese
perspective of the same battle. What’s the point of
making a pair of historical epics, if both merely
reflect and reinforce deep-seeded racist attitudes
rather than attempt to teach tolerance, understanding
and an appreciation of our cultural differences?
Fair (1 star) /
Rated R for expletives, ethnic slurs, and the graphic
depiction of the carnage of war) / Running time: 132
minutes / Studio: Dreamworks Pictures /
http://www.flagsofourfathers.com/
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SoulMate
Successful, Single, & Satisfied Sisters
Reflect on Their State
in Spiritually-Oriented Documentary
Everybody is well aware of the dire statistics. Black
women are 5 times as likely to never marry as white
women. 70% of new AIDS cases in this country are among
African-American females in America, and the disease is
the leading killer of black women between the ages of 25
and 34. Over 40% of black women have never been married,
and the more money they make, the less likely they are
to tie the knot or procreate.
All
of the above might lead one to wonder how sisters are
coping in the face of such insurmountable odds.
Fortunately, some rather revealing answers have arrived
in
SoulMate
a moving documentary in which some very
intelligent, educated, attractive, successful and
spiritual black women open up to share their heartfelt
feelings about their predicament.
Directed by veteran TV-producer Andrea Wiley (The Fresh
Prince of Bel-Air), the picture features testimonials
from subjects so ostensibly desirable it is
mind-boggling to believe it when they speak of their
loneliness and how badly they’d like to share their
abundance with a brother ready to settle down and start
a family. But whether a businesswoman, a model, a
doctor, a company president, a shrink, a sales exec, a
minister, an actress, or in another walk-of-life, they
all recite a similar refrain, namely, that they have
long-since made peace with the distinct possibility of
growing old alone.
Why
is marriage so elusive for accomplished black women, the
most unpartnered segment of the U.S. population? The
participants cite the skyrocketing black male
incarceration rate, the down-low phenomenon, and
brothers dating women of other colors as all
contributing factors.
One
sees the problem as more deep-seeded, surmising that
“the institution of slavery systematically tore our
families apart, and some of the process that began then,
continues now… And since the Sixties, our ability to
partner has deteriorated considerably.”
Another points to the fact that even Oprah Winfrey and
Condoleezza Rice are still single as proof of how
serious a situation we’re dealing with. Yet another
interviewee, unwilling to be in the “freak file” in
anybody’s Rolodex, says resolutely that shed rather
remain celibate till she finds a spot in the right man’s
“forever file.”
Candid conversations with Christ as the common
denominator, Soulmate offers a fascinating, frank and
ultimately optimistic exploration of a woefully
unaddressed issue.
Excellent (4 stars) / Unrated Running time: 83 minutes /
Studio: Clean Heart Productions / DVD Extras: Bonus
footage, profile of the director, and a faith-based
featurette. To order, visit:
http://www.soulmatefilm.com/thetrailer.htm
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Death
of a President
Bush
Bites the Dust in Assassination Docudrama
Most
of the discussion surrounding this controversial
docudrama has revolved around whether it’s okay to
depict the assassination of a sitting president. Now, if
you believe in freedom of speech, next, you’ve got to
ask yourself how you feel about specifically seeing
George Bush wasted. The answer to that question is
likely to depend on which side of the aisle you align
yourself with, as was the case with such politically
polarizing pictures as Fahrenheit 9/11 and V for
Vendatta.
As a
film critic, you find yourself almost in a no-win
situation whenever you choose to review a movie like
Death of a President, because most of the audience is
predisposed to love or hate the film, and has already
formed an opinion about it before entering the theater.
So, I have learned to brace myself for the hate mail,
which has less to do with what was onscreen than with
ideological arguments.
That
being said,
Death
of a President
is actually an
intelligent and fairly compelling docudrama, which opens
on October 19, 2007 with Bush about to land in Chicago
where he is set to deliver a patriotic speech at a
Republican fundraiser in a ballroom full of supporters.
Outside, however, the cops are doing there best to keep
an unruly crowd of picketers at bay, irate of an array
of the administration’s policies.
Afterwards, as the Secret Service escorts the President
out of the hotel, he is felled by a bullet to the chest.
The agents help him into his limousine and the motorcade
rushes to the hospital where the mortally-wounded Bush
soon expires.
In
the proverbial rush to judgment, the FBI fingers a
Middle Eastern man (Zahra Abi Zikri), based on shaky
circumstantial evidence alone, even though there had
been plenty of other suspects in the windy City that
night with a motive to murder the President. Besides
Arab terrorists, it could have been the work of any
number of fed up and frustrated activists from the
lunatic fringe.
In
fact, there were so many Bush haters out there, on both
the left and the right, that the authorities received
thousands of tips blaming responsibility on radicals
with anti-war, pro-environment, pro-choice, even white
supremacist agendas. But the government conveniently
opted to ignore the possibility that the assassin could
have been homegrown, unraveling that mystery is the
prevailing plotline in Death of a President.
With
an innocent Muslim sitting on Death Row, the movie makes
some very powerful statements about the Patriot Act, the
erosion of our Constitutional rights, and the abuse of
power, all while amply illustrating why an awful lot of
red-blooded Americans feel betrayed by Dubya? Do the
Feds crack the case? Yes, and the fruits of that very
deliberate investigation is what ultimately makes the
movie worthwhile in this critic’s opinion.
Though this flashback flick contains a
standard disclaimer about its being a fictional account,
that must be the director’s idea of a tongue-in-cheek
joke, because who else could Bush be playing except
himself? And Dick Cheney deserves an Oscar-nomination
for delivering such a heartfelt eulogy at his boss’
funeral after ascending to the Presidency.
Overall,
Death
of a President
must be dubbed a technical
masterpiece, as it seamlessly weaves reams of real
footage in with staged events to create a not too
distant future where this scenario could actually be
played out. It’s also a bit anti-climactic after Bush is
blown away, bogging down till we arrive at the
surprising and satisfactory conclusion. And, of course,
it’s ethically debatable, since we don’t want to
encourage copycat killers.
Next year, beware the 19th of October.
Excellent (4 stars) / Unrated Running time: 93 minutes /
Studio: Newmarket Films /
http://www.deathofapresident.com/links.html
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Color of the Cross
Crucifixion
Revisited with Black Jesus as Victim of Bias Crime
Was
Jesus a black man? He might have been, given the
features of the folks from the region of the world where
he was born. He was at least more likely to look more
like a brother than the generally-accepted
representations of him as a fair-skinned, flaxen-haired
Caucasian. Yet, Hollywood has never seen fit to make a
major motion picture featuring a sepia Son of God. Till
now.
Color of the Cross
is the brainchild of actor/writer/director
Jean-Claude LaMarre, a gifted tale-spinner who does much
more here than merely revisit the life of Christ in
blackface. For this controversial reinterpretation of
the scriptures, which transpires during the 48 hours
leading up to the Crucifixion, mixes many instantly
recognizable Biblical passages with speculation about a
motive for murdering Jesus which had to do with his skin
color.
So,
we find familiar scenes such as those taking place in
the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus (LaMarre) prayed to
God the Father the night before he died, and where he
was later betrayed by Judas (Johann John Jean) with a
kiss for 30 pieces of silver. Of course, there’s The
Last Supper, the last meal Christ shared with the
Apostles.
Superficially,
Color of the Cross
reads like a Passion
Play except for the fact that Jesus is black, and that
he has been rejected by disbelieving rabbis who have a
hard time swallowing the idea that of a dark-skinned
Messiah. In fact, they routinely refer to him as the
black Nazarene, so in this version of the New Testament
not only do the Jews crucify Christ, but they’re
portrayed as racists to boot.
Although this ethnic discrimination angle might be
factually inaccurate, since if Jesus was a black Jew,
his accusers must’ve mostly been black Jews, too, the
best thing about
Color of the Cross
is that it finally
furnishes us with a reason for the Crucifixion. It
reminded me of the Don Rickles routine in which the
comedian wondered how his people could possibly have
screwed up Christmas. Now we at least have a theory.
The
storyline aside, Jean-Claude LaMarre charismatic
performance as Jesus is what really holds the production
together. He receives considerable help in this regard
from his capable supporting cast which includes Debbi
Morgan as the Virgin Mary, Ananda Lewis as Leah, Akiva
David as John, Jacinto Taras Riddick as Peter, and John
Pierre Parent as Doubting Thomas.
Is
the film blasphemous? Blasphemy is in the eye of the
beholder. But it’s certainly a lot closer in tone to
The
Ten Commandments (1956) and
The Greatest Story Ever Told
(1965) than to
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) or
Andy Warhol’s Imitation of Christ (1967).
Regardless, if Kanye West can appear on the cover of
Rolling Stone sporting a crown of thorns, then we’re
probably already primed for a religious epic featuring
an ebony Prince of Peace. Let the debates begin!
Excellent (4 stars) / Rated PG-13 for graphic
crucifixion images / Running time: 108 minutes / Studio:
Nu-Lite Entertainment /
http://www.colorofthecross.com
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Lloyd Kam Williams is an attorney and a member of the bar
in NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.
If you like these reviews consider making a donation
posted 29 October 2006
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update 6 August 2008 |
