Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942)

It's always great to see Paul Muni, and I am totally invested in WWII movies that were made during the war. But this movie just isn't that interesting. It's about a Norwegian dude who is living a peaceable life but is driven to rebellion when the Nazis arrive in Norway and start killing people. Some of the battle scenes are good, but I think I was expecting something a bit more emotionally engaging considering Paul Muni was the lead.

Wake Island

Wake Island was apparently a huge box-office smash in 1942, as well as being widely acclaimed by critics. I was less impressed than the USAmerican populace in 1942, I guess. Act one is actually awful – stilted writing, bad acting, awkward editing.

Act two involves this absurd monologue about how women create memories or something. But the good part of acts two and three is the bombing of Wake island by Japanese forces. The sound, the explosions, the tension of it – all of that is great. I loved all of the air sequences too: they're balletic and exciting and dynamic.

As for the film's politics, Wake Island island surprised me by valorizing suicidal sacrifice by USAmerican soldiers. As much as the Japanese kamikaze would be demonized by United States media, our own media celebrated suicidal missions and sacrificing one's self for one's nation.

As for actual violence, Wake Island soft pedals things, like most films from this period under the PCA. When a man dies, he sort of clutches his breast, seizes up, and collapses. This isn't Bataan. Men don't bleed in Wake Island; they just fall over.

Honestly, though, it's sort of crazy that John Farrow made this movie in 1942, less than a year after the actual battle for Wake. And I was shocked to find that the film also references the Warsaw ghetto! Wake Island was released in August 1942, and evacuations of Polish Jews to Treblinka had only begun earlier that Summer.

The film ends with an upbeat musical sequence, over which a voice intones: "These marines fought a great fight!" as though the whole thing were a game. It's an odd bit of nonsense, that quote obviously makes the whole thing seem like a bit of fun rather than a slaughter in which hundreds of men were killed.

In any case, this ended up being sort of cool to watch, even if it is, more often than not, overly sentimental and awkwardly made.

Four (+) Movies from CA

I've been seeing a lot of people lately and spending time with them, so my movie-watching (and certainly my scholarship-reading) has been relegated to the backburner. I am almost finished with one of the coolest books in gender studies I've ever read (I've read so few that each one seems cooler than the next); it's called Space, Time, and Perversion and it's by an Australian philosopher named Elizabeth Grosz. It's thick with psychoanalytic theory (blech) and lots and lots of feminist philosophy (yay!)

So, movies: Hondo with John Wayne is actually really good. It had been a while since I watched a Wayne western. This one is fun. It's short and tightly scripted, which is always a plus, and there are some very fun action sequences. Wayne still looks great (the film is from '53, well after he had become a star in the late 1930s) and Hondo also stars a new-to-the-screen Geraldine Page, who nabbed an Oscar nomination for her work in the film. Hondo is no Shane, but it's worth a rental if you're in a western mood.

I thought Shrek the Third was pretty funny. It's totally mindless, but it's certainly not boring and there's enough Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas to keep you giggling. The pop culture references seem older, too: references to Dionne Warwick, "Live and Let Die" and A Chorus Line are not aimed at children, surely. My friend and I were cracking up and knew that no kids in the theatre even were aware that there had been a joke. As usual, the humor that is aimed at the kids is the kind you probably don't want your kids picking up. This is the bizzare part of the Shrek franchise to me. Do you really want to teach your children to emulate fart jokes and that what is really funny are jokes about earwax and poo? Weird.

Seventies horror flick Eyes of Laura Mars is a bit of a classic. It made lots of money in 1978, when it came out, and it starred the fabulous (and brilliant) Faye Dunaway, who had just won an Oscar for my favorite movie of all time Network. Laura Mars may be a classic, but it's also pretty terribly clichéd, if you ask me. It's central heroine, who seems a strong, confident, cosmopolitan artist who is at the top of her game and is great at her work is reduced, as the film goes on, to the oh-so-typical damsel-in-distress type. In a day and age where I expect my heroines to kick ass and fuck a murderer up, Laura Mars seems rather banal, even if she is plagued with visions of the future. (This might be one of the reasons the Spider-man franchise puts me to sleep, too.)

Speaking of action heroines, Paprika the new Kon Satoshi anime offering, is totally weird and very, very cool. It's about dreams and it's filled with all of this weird Freudian and Lacanian imagery. I was crazy about it, and its heroine is a truly badass chick. Plus, as is usual for Kon, Paprika is a visual knockout. See this one in the theatre, y'all.