Streaming Bullets: STREET FIGHTER, THE EXPENDABLES 2, MARWENCOL, DOGS OF WAR, BATTLE OF BRITAIN

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.

------

Battle of Britain

Starring: Michael Caine, Robert Shaw, Laurence Olivier,
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.


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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In Praise of Dangerous Men: George C. Scott as PATTON (1970)

"The very idea of losing is hateful to Americans."

- Patton (1970)

Now that Kathryn Bigelow has made it safe for us to recklessly court macho annihilation again, let's examine one of the more respected and controversial military leaders of our time-- General George Patton, and the 1970 film that bears his name, starring George C. Scott, which I recently had the pleasure of acquiring on an excellent blu-ray disc, and which is highly recommended to fans of THE HURT LOCKER (2009), THE DEER HUNTER (1977) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) and anyone whose ever had a heart, who wouldn't turn around and expose its flank to daily howitzer bombardments... or who is interested in this new Tom Hanks-produced mini-series, THE PACIFIC (though Patton wasn't in the Pacific, it's still the same God-damned wonderful war!)

From the famous opening (quoted above) -- Patton's clinically insane and perhaps wrong but nonetheless inspiring opening speech in front of a giant American flag -- onwards, we know we're in for some heavy stuff, as Scott has no plans to pull punches, glorify the American dream or lament the unfairness of war. Indeed, as the esteemed general of the magnificent Third Army, Scott's ranting makes you realize, as a man, that part of cowardice involves forgetting there's no real reward to being alive in the first place, as a coward.  Unless you risk it all, it's all wasted.

It makes sense that Francis Ford Coppola worked on the script, since the man knows a thing or too about the seductive lure of megalomania and the high of facing death on a daily basis. Coppola was kicked off the PATTON production but later found fictional editions of that kind of military mindset in characters like Kilgore, Willard and Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW, and brilliantly captured the way an ordinary man might find himself manifesting the cold reptilian killer via Michael Corleone's transformation from idealistic young lover of Diane Keaton to cold-as-ice Don in THE GODFATHER. And of course, there's the inspired use of Sicily, a deeply-rooted trans-historical lyricism seems to emanate from the very soil of that island, and Coppola knew it and let it infuse GODFATHER 2. 

In order to rouse his newly assigned group of men from their first defeat in North Africa (he's replacing an ineffectual general who let the boys get slaughtered), Patton initially presents himself as a maniac for discipline and army regulation, making his men fear and hate him, but the hate makes them better soldiers, and when they finally measure up, his admiration becomes enough of a reward that they're ready to die for him. As Cesar "The Dog Whisperer" Milan would say, he is an excellent pack leader, radiating calm, assertive energy and understanding that all affection must be earned for it to have value. Or as Tura Satana said in FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL KILL: "You don't have to believe it, just act it." Patton doesn't mind that your hands shake so long as you're trying to keep them steady. It's only when you cower and quit that he boots you into the deep end like a sadistic but wise pool instructor (my own most hated-feared childhood figure).

I don't dare presume I wouldn't be ten times more afraid and shell-shocked in the field of battle than the man Patton slaps, or even Jeremy Davies in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998). One can't know from a besotted armchair field position, but there are other ways to prove your courage, such as smuggling drugs out of Istanbul, or trying to score with the hottest chick in the room without any wingman or back-up, or bluffing your way past the velvet ropes at a hot nightclub, or even just not drinking, one day at a time. True adult courage is important to bear in mind as the alienating effect of technology quietly mutates us back into children via unsupervised lengths of time in complete privacy, allowing the illusion of a mommy bound to serve you instead of vice versa. If God had given us wings he'd expect us to fly, even demand it, so in the age of internet, why not go all the way and abandon your body? If God hadn't meant us to leave our bodies he wouldn't have given us the internet. Needless to say, that kind of alone time is deprived our common foot soldier or tank brigadier. You can get almost anything in the army except privacy. A soldier is booted into manhood and has to stay there until he likes it, and that could take years. By the time he figures it out, the war is over.

Patton's discipline is intended to create that condition of initiation, Stockholm syndrome in the service of country - there's still going to be the odd soldier who resists the comfort of berserker madness and thinks clinging to the crumbling shards of his childhood persona will preserve rather than destroy him. In the end all the military drilling and exhaustion is to weaken the ego's dogmatic hold, so you can actually be molded into a killing machine who can then run into the path of flaming bullets--against all self-preservational logic. But as long as one soldier can get away with pretending to be sick to get out of combat, the morale of the whole unit is in jeopardy. Hence a little bitch-slap, which he performs in a sense as performance for the other men. Watching this with my dad as a child I used to think Patton was being a bully for slapping the soldier. Later, as a hippie, I thought he was existentialist and square. Now I'm all into his heart of darkness. Patton must necessarily be excused from any consequences that may stem from disrespecting boundaries, for the best defense is a good offense and therefore disrespecting boundaries is the mark of a good general. Eisenhower also shows himself a good general too in the way he masterfully plays up the slapping event up to deflect Nazi attention from D-Day (he had Patton scoping locations in Turkey, tricking the Germans sure into thinking he would invade there, and that the slap incident was a flimsy smokescreen - double reverse psych!).  A slap from a general may be humiliating, but in a way it did more for the war than getting blown up by a stray shell from Rommel's Panzer corps.

A word should be paid in tribute to the blu-ray version of this film: Dazzling! Originally shot on 70mm the picture is deep, and that has made all the difference in the 1080 transfer, enabling a dazzling clarity that lets you look up the nose of a man in a tank 5,000 yards away. The many long range desert battles seem to be in 3-D. The horizon line of the desert (this movie is always very horizon line conscious) warps the sides of the frame (Todd AO fisheye Cinerama 360 lenses) into a sloped elongated triangle, so it's like looking into a sloping Victorian house attic with North African desert wallpaper. If ever there was a reason to get blu-ray, this or Polanski's REPULSION would be it for me. I tried looking at the GODFATHER blu-ray, but got freaked out that you could finally see Bonasara the Undertaker's yellowed teeth clattering in the shadows as he talked of "vengeance for my daughter!"

Scott's nose is amazing on blu-ray, too: we can see three layers of veins in.  But his aim sucks. When shooting at German dive bombers, you have to lead them, not shoot behind them! He should have shot straight over his head - you got to "lead" em (1)!

Consider the line from the hippest movie ever made, PERFORMANCE:  "The only performance that truly makes it is one that achieves madness." When George C. Scott looks out at the carnage along the River Elbe, and says of war, "I love it. God help me I do love it so," one's aware that this right here is a performance that "truly makes it."

I've seen this movie all through my life and my reaction to that line varies with age. As a child watching it with my dad on TV I thought it was pretentious. Later, it seemed existentially gutsy; still later, callous. Now I see it as a coping mechanism, the very nature of heroism is perhaps this coping mechanism, an alchemical transubstantiation that enables one to derive perverse, counter-intuitive satisfaction from horror, the "you must make friend of horror" aspect, a looking down under the pretty flowers and below the serpents under them, to the deep roots wherein one endures the unendurable through a cultivated detachment, the stripping away of illusion's bodice, to reveal the grinning skull and scythe below. The tripper and the warrior both must kiss this skull and call it love.

To survive this awful surrender the hipster has his rueful irony, the court its jester, the American G.I. his endless complaining and satiric reading of army sloganeering.  The Germans never got that sense of humor -- they considered it our weakness.  They didn't realize that irony can be a kind of casual loyalty that works better than attack dog allegiance because--and this turned out to be a crucial advantage--the GI could improvise and think on his feet while the German was trained only to follow direct orders. As long as we can gripe and crack wise about it we can endure anything, that was what made us the winners: freedom to gripe about being losers!

One of my favorite war stories is how, during the Battle of the Bulge, the US tanks' top machine guns froze solid and couldn't be fired at the closely advancing enemy. Here it is, Germans breathing down their necks, bullets all around; it's freezing out, guns jammed and what do the machine gunners do? Urinate on them for a quick defrost! See, a German soldier would never think to do that. One needs a certain level of free-flying insanity to win a war, and that's what Patton had, and inspired in his men. To paraphrase Cesar Milan again: Insanity + Discipline, then affection.

Perhaps in war there simply is no rational response other than hoorror and heartbreak, neither of which wins wars. Therefore an irrational response is required: surrender completely to the "I love it, I do love it so," like a mantra, a relishing of the insane response. Do not the true prophets teach even that? To love your enemy like a brother even as you blow him to pieces? The movie ends with Scott intoning Patton's description of the triumphant Roman processionals of loot and conquered slaves before him: "And behind him, stood a slave with a golden crown, holding it over the conqueror's head while whispering in his ear, 'all glory is fleeting.'" But the film holds an even more shattering truth: life fleets even faster and death is not the end. Ladies and gentlemen, as he was in ancient Rome so shall he be in this future life. General Patton will be back!

(1) from the pages of the DC comic Sgt. Rock (c. 1980) - "You got to lead 'em! Lead 'em" when shooting at passing Messerschmidts. My friend Al and I quoted that a lot.

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