Halloween is over. The gloom of depressing November descends. If it warms up and is a beautiful fall day like today, don't trust it, private! It's a trap! That fall foliage is the color of death, those leaf piles hide ninjas in autumnal-colored shinobi shōzoku!
Stay inside, instead, with Netflix streaming. You will learn things. Did you know pink lipstick is never out of style in combat? (see Walken, driving above). War and action films are an essential ingredient in any red-eyed, white-pallored, blue-balled American male, and Netflix has enough to make any armchair general's saber rattle in its sheath. I recently spent some time with a few, picked both by me and a few choice allies. Private, hit the lights...
The Expendables 2
Starring: Everyone
2012
****
It's typical of the series' self-effacing humor that this group calls themselves Expendables. very A-list action star (and even B-list) of the last 30 years shows up, riffing on their Hollywood personas with a wry chuckle and (probably) working for scale + percentage. As with the first there's a refreshing lack of cliche or complications: no incompetence, betrayal, sudden death of best friends, tedious, tenuous familial connection (no wives bemoaning that their husbands are never home), no moral confusion over running over innocent bystanders or any of the other crap that makes real life war and most war movies such a drag. When you send these guys in, you're not looking for prisoners or honored border treaties, you're expecting massive enemy body counts and first-rate dudes-in-a-pack humor. They'll deliver. The spirit of Howard Hawks all but lights Sly's stogie!
Most A-list stars here show up only for a few big scenes, but Stallone carries it all on his back like a champ. He's pushing 70 but is in great shape, has a wondrous sense of self-deprecating humor. Does a man good to see his masterful ease with a smoke in the dark of deserted restaurant the night before a big attack, or to hear his tectonic plate of a body ripple with a single seismographic chuckle at zingers about his age. The camaraderie he generates around him rings as true as Rio Bravo and one feels, as a man, reborn in it. We don't have to worry about anyone getting the jump on him more than once, for he is the man. We can relax and dig the carnage. We're here because we're tired of blind realism and liberal sermons. At the tail end in age and politics of the demographic these films are made for, I can tell you I want cathartic explosions and killing, not suspense or 'bad faith' guilt. There's no need for our films to heed laws of averages or national diplomacy. They just go blasting in, blasting out, and do it all their own way, in their own plane, on their own time, with their own weapons, even their own lighters - everything is cool and black, including their badass plane. Their whole life aesthetic seems to exist in the empty space between a Jack Daniels bottle (the old kind), a pack of Marlboro reds, and a Zippo while shooting pool in your friend's basement. And if that's not ideal for an action movie I don't know what is. See it while your significant other is asleep, so you can blast it through headphones, the expensive kind with heavy bass, so you can feel each boom, bang, and breath of tough guy bonding, because that kind of Hawksian men-in-a-group lived-in overlapping dialogue dynamic is all but extinct.
Dogs of War
Starring: Christopher Walken, JoBeth Williams
1980
***
Like a prelude to The Expendables, these mercenaries, led by Christopher Walken, like to decimate their opponent with superior firepower after much superior strategizing. Though in Dogs there's also lots of planning, running, loading, and aiming. The Expendables skips the whole recon mission, jail and torture and release, the stealthy journey forth in boats that have to pass through customs with all the weapons hidden in oil drums, etc. But if you want to know the minutiae involved with overthrowing an evil African dictator and installing a western corporate interest-friendly African dictator this is your better bet.
Best of all, if you love the Deer Hunter but are dubious over Walken's character's survival on the Russian roulette circuit (which, as I've written, was frustratingly unrealistic, both historically and via the law of averages), you can imagine Walken's mercenary career as a much more logical and realistic alternative way to express a PSTD-related death wish. And when, after a whole movie worth of build-up he busts out that crazy repeating grenade launcher and practically destroys the whole compound singlehandedly, it's pretty damned cathartic. Walken is magnificent, even when he turns noble.
Also, his NYC life is well-etched in that uniquely 70s 'when the city was still dangerous' modality, so that's another plus, since when isn't it worth it watching Walken hustle around the mean streets in a black coat with the collar up? Why hasn't he ever made a movie with Scorsese? It seems like he must have. JoBeth Williams is the girl he makes idle plans to get away from it all with, and she doesn't believe him anymore, but tosses him a hotel room lay. And he teaches a wayward local black kid to work for his living. What... eva. Time to pack up the gear and go. I remember this film well as one of the first VHS rentals my dad ever brought home. Though I was best friends with a Soldier of Fortune-reading nutcase (see: Rage of Huberty), and loved war comics, I didn't like Dogs at the time --too much plot, not enough jumping out of exploding watchtowers in slow motion. But now I need a slow lead up to really feel the cathartic unleashing.
Street Fighter
Starring: Jean Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Kylie Minogue
1994
***1/2
Say what you want about this film, like BOMB (Maltin), ** (imb), or 13% (rottentomatoes), my girl and I think Streetfighter is delightful romp for a lazy Saturday when you can't summon the will to vacuum or go out in the rain. If you haven't seen it you might confuse it with all those first person shooter films like Doom, where everyone's trapped in a locked-down maze of drippy subterranean tunnels and breaking bones. This is a different game altogether. This one is pretty sunny and merry, especially with those divine powder blue outfits on the coded UN guys. It's got that international style, the Jackie Chan film aesthetic, but is also populated with crazy villains and stunning international portfolio of a cast: Kylie Minogue as Van Damme's right hand woman ass-kicker; Raul Julia laughing maniacally in red gestapo cap, black cape and silver gloves, demolishing the awesome customized tail fin/red skull scenery. In addition to ransoming a bin full of hostages, Cool Raul is making a steroid-pumped monster (from one of JCVD's former buddies) in the basement of his evil fortress. But the fortress also is full of high places and chain pulleys to swing down from in ripped derring do. Great lines like "General Byson, he's a bad guy?" top off the blood sundae.
In some ways it reminds me of John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China only not as good. What is? Countless dumber, worser action films escape the critical hostility lauded on poor Street Fighter. Why? Is it a global conspiracy? Every evil critic in the world, my right hand woman and I challenge you! Vivat gloria stupiditatem! Raul Julia's last theatrical film, dedicated to him with the words vaya con dios. And you still deny its godhood?
Marwencol
Documentary about Mark Hogencamp
2010
*****
Not only is this a fascinating psychological examination, but it says so much about the opiate-like effect imagining combat, explosions, the threat of immanent death, desire, and most of all, camaraderie on even the average male psyche, mine included. See, I love WW2 because it was the last time our freedom really was at stake, for real. And we won by working together like our collective and personal life depended on it, rather than lording it over the poker table with our nuclear flush we were almost out of chips, so the game mattered more, and so our victory was and remains the last time we as a nation rejoiced unanimously, red and blue states one mass out in the streets, in a spontaneous outpouring of joy and relief. I used WW2 as a mantra myself, during my squirrely tween phase in the slasher-filled early 80s. Just thinking about Sgt. Rock, Sgt. Fury, or The Unknown Soldier or the tank corps. in All-Out War kept me calm. Seeing a film on TV like Battle of the Bulge or Force 10 from Navarone could keep me less spooked as I tried to sleep in the slasher-filled 80s.
Mark Hogencamp shares this weird warm fondness for a time and place he wasn't at --that ties into it too, we get to play dead or unborn. Given a weird brain damage after a near-fatal beating thrown by a random cabal of douches, he's found an outlet for his madness in creating Marwencol, a fictional Belgian town occupied by both allied and Nazi forces at various times, overrun with sexy spies and good time taverns, and Hogencamp gets such a naturalized feel from his action figures, getting the right amount of dried mud on the jeep tires, etc., that it's truly astounding. He's an inspiration for all outsider artists.... just forget any notion you'll ever be discovered and lose yourself completely in your awesome art, and let it keep you sane. Follow your craziest dreams, even if they lead you over a magical cliff back to WW2 or at least a New York art gallery.
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Battle of Britain
Starring: Michael Caine, Robert Shaw, Laurence Olivier,
Susannah York, everyone else
Susannah York, everyone else
1969
**
This film shuffles around an all-star Brit cast and a lovingly restored bundle of German Heinkels, Stukas and Messerschmidts tangling with the Brits' beloved Spitfires, which were light enough to bounce like rubber balls on the landing fields but had great speed and maneuverability, including absurdly strong climbing rates thanks to the Rolls Royce Merlin Engines. We see Spitfires polishing off Heinkels by the dozen, occasionally getting nicked by a turret gunner or fighter escort, bailing out over the Thames, or whatever.
The thing is, has England ever really had so much clear weather, ever? There's no more than a handful of clouds in the whole film, and no anti-aircraft guns are ever seen and only two barrage balloons show up. Across the channel, Goering rants and raves and struts while an invading army of about three guys in a raft stand around waiting to invade.
Still, this was the age before CGI and while the explosions as planes are shot out of the sky are clearly superimposed, it's because the planes are all real, restored war artifacts, and one gets a surprisingly clear idea of how it all worked. Though it's odd that after a few months of preparation the Germans bomb airfields that are a) undefended, not even with an alarm, b) totally free of ack ack, anti-aircraft guns, c) even the sound of approaching bombers or the sounds of bombs dropping don't seem to rouse the crew; they shuffle around in search of an unbroken tea cup while the hangers burn, perhaps lacking a clear direction cue from the overly-engaged director, Guy Hamilton.
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Of the woman in the cast, Susannah York fares well as a high ranking air traffic officer who continually denies her pesky husband's insistence she transfer out to safer Scotland. Good for her! And what's up with her mod hair cut? No time to find out! Here comes the Heinkels for another round of battle, so similar to the ones that came before they might be just reusing whole sequences.
And after enough dogfight scenes and ground support chatter have been contrasted, Goering calls it off, takes a train back to Berlin from the Pais de Calais, and the film ends.
We win!
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