Tag: Adolph Hitler

RACE (2016) – The Review

race

Hollywood knows that one genre is almost certain to get the audience’s blood pumping and pulse racing: the sports story. CREED certainly proved that a few months ago (you’d think audiences were watching a real live boxing match, judging from the all the cheering at the multiplex). Couple that on-screen excitement with a dramatic true story, and you’ve hopefully got a critical and box office hit. And while professional sports may be tainted and tarnished thanks to bad behavior and big bucks, the amateur athletes still have a purity and nobility about them. There have been plenty of college (WE ARE MARSHALL), high school (HOOSIERS), and even grade school (THE BAD NEWS BEARS) team tales, but for individual triumphs, the four-year spectacle, the Olympics, abound in stories of glory and drama. Well 2016 just so happens to be an olympic year, so the studios are launching the first of several such true tales of courage today. Next week I’ll be back with a charming, funny film fable from the 1988 Winter games, and in March we’ll get a raunchy fictional comedy set in that competitive backdrop. But for now, we travel all the way back to 1936, eighty years,for a film whose title has a double meaning: RACE.

The focus of RACE is the incredible story of that track and field wonder, African-American icon Jesse Owens (Stephan James). We meet him as he prepares to enroll at Ohio State University. Jesse packs his suitcase, dresses in his best (and only) suit, and says his goodbye to his family in their crowded rundown apartment in the slums of Cleveland. Ohio. And he also bids adieu to his longtime gal, beautician Ruth (Shanice Banton) and their two-year old (out-of-wedlock) daughter Gloria. Arriving on campus, he heads to the office of track and field coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis) to become part of the college team. Despite their awkward first meeting, Snyder is impressed by Owens’s school records and helps him land a part-time job as he trains him for the upcoming Big Ten meet in Ann Arbor (all while dealing with the rampant racism in the sports department). When Jesse breaks three world records(within an hour), his dreams of Olympic gold begin. Meanwhile in New York City, the United States Olympic Committee is engaged in a heated debate about the upcoming Summer games in Berlin, Germany. Jeremiah Mahoney (William Hurt) is horrified at the actions of Chancellor Adolf Hitler and believes the US should boycott the games, while Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons) believes that the Olympics should put politics aside. It is decided that Avery will travel to Berlin and check out the atmosphere there. Meanwhile Jesse begins a fling with a nightclub regular, Quincella (Chantel Riley), that threatens to end his relationship to Ruth and derail his sports career. Luckily he gets his priorities straight while German officials assure Avery that all will be in order (this after he observes their brutal treatment of the Jewish community), and is introduced to the film maker that will chronicle the games, Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten) for the feature film OLYMPIA. But will the local organizers keep their promises of “fair play” when Jesse and the rest of the American team arrive in Berlin?

As Owens, Stephan James projects strength and determination helping us comprehend the real man’s incredible achievements. Through his eyes and body language we see how this gifted man had to temper himself while navigating through a society that embraced his accomplishments while denigrating him for his color. Even as he takes a walk on the wild side with his “jazz baby” temptress, James still goes us a hero that we can applaud (the dalliance makes him more human) despite his foibles. Sudeikis breaks free of his motor-mouthed, wise guy comic persona as Coach Snyder. He’s a man of deep regret (we learn during a terrific monologue) who vows to guide Owens to fulfill the promise that Snyder himself squandered. All the while he becomes a surrogate father to Owens, one who bristles and barks back at the ignorant while Owens must remain silent. Irons as Brundage is all businessman as the sight of Nazi brutality disgusts him. His admiration for the Olympic ideals too often blinds him to the injustices behind the scenes. Ultimately, he submits too easily. Hurt shines in a role that is basically a cameo (despite the billing in the ads), his Mahoney knows that Hitler only wishes to use the games to glorify and promote his own agenda. Ms. van Houten, like James, is determined not to let her hard work and talents be exploited. Though Goebbels and his goons try to thwart her, Leni wants to tell the whole story with no filters.

Director Stephens Hopkins does a good job at keeping the story coherent while maintaining a steady pace. Unfortunately the script from Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel attempts to tell too many tales at once, any of which could have been made into separate movies. There’s the whole debate within the committee, the wheeling and dealing between Germany and Brundage, and certainly the making of OLYMPIA could make for interesting films. The constant interruptions detract from the Owens story. It doesn’t help that we only meet him after his teenage years, which doesn’t tell us just how his running and jumping prowess began (plus there’s the whole romance with Ruth plus their then scandalous behavior) . And aside from a brief mid credit scene, we don’t see Owens’s life after the gold medals (we know he’s part of a great joke in BLAZING SADDLES, but …). The 1930’s are expertly recreated with vintage fashions and autos, while CGI convincingly places us next to Jesse inside that massive studium with thousands looking down. Plus those track performances (especially the long jump) are inspiring in their visual power. Fewer subplot negotiations and more athletics would have made RACE as light on its feet as the miraculous Mr. Owens himself.

3 Out of 5

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Review: ‘Valkyrie’

Jeremy:

Let’s just get this out of the way. The accents, or lack thereof, found in ‘Valkyrie’ are not distracting. The fact that every character in the film is German, yet only Thomas Kretschmann speaks with a German accent, is not that big of a deal. You buy that Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, and Tom Wilkinson are German just as you bought Sean Connery, Sam Neill, and Tim Curry as Russians in ‘The Hunt for Red October’. This aspect, though it has been getting a lot of play by people commenting on the film before even seeing it, is quickly swept aside.

In ‘Valkyrie’ Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a German colonel who is severely wounded leading Hitler’s army in Africa. Once he returns home and recovers from his wounds, though he is left with one eye, one hand, and three fingers on the other, he sets out to plot and execute Operation Valkyrie. Not being a fan of Hitler’s idea for his country from the very start, Stauffenberg, along with a large coalition of soldiers and politicians, wish to overthrow the Nazi Fuhrer and make a truce with the Allies. All of this culminates in the July 20th attempt on Hitler’s life and the tragic aftermath.

Obviously, Hitler survived the assassination attempt, and Stauffenberg and the resistance failed in overtaking Germany. The suspense derived from ‘Valkyrie’s screenplay, written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, is left to emanate from the direction by Bryan Singer and the performances of the actors. It’s good to see Singer and McQuarrie working together again. The writing/directing team has not worked together since 1995’s ‘The Usual Suspects’, and you would think the team that put that film together could pull off an intense story about Operation Valkyrie. They don’t.

‘Valkyrie’, while an admirable effort in telling the tale of the few, good German people who fought against Hitler, is anything but a suspenseful thriller. Don’t let the trailers fool you. There is very little action in ‘Valkyrie’. There’s a quick, battle sequence near the beginning, and a slightly enthralling attempt on Hitler’s life. The central attempt on Hitler’s life and the aftermath of Stauffenberg and his men trying to overthrow the German government despite their failings all comes in the film’s final 45 minutes. There’s a middle hour of ‘Valkyrie’ that is made up of men sitting in rooms, conversing about their plans.

While that may sound like boredom incarnate, there is an element to them that makes them more exciting than you would naturally think. For the most part, these scenes, though not thrilling at all, are quite dynamic. This is made possible by the stimulating performances by gifted actors such as Nighy, Wilkinson, Terence Stamp, and Kenneth Branagh, who sticks around far too briefly. All of these actors pull their respective parts off brilliantly, and they really add a sincerity that the story needs to make it exciting.

Cruise doesn’t do it. He plays Stauffenberg with true grit, no pun intended, but there is never a point where he embodies the character. It’s always Cruise on screen. You can’t get past that. Not even the eye patch, which Cruise seems to use as a character crutch, helps him personify Stauffenberg any more effectively.

A one-note thriller, ‘Valkyrie’ never really takes off like it probably should. Much of the film’s problem comes from its screenplay, which is lackluster at best. Singer does what he can with it, and there are moments where the film’s direction overshadows how mediocre a scene is written. There is only one scene, in which Stauffenberg meets Hitler for the first time at Hitler’s mountain retreat, which truly works perfectly. It’s an inspired scene, but it almost feels like an afterthought, as if it were thrown in at the 11th hour to add a little more suspense to the story. The rest of the film moves at a singular pace, always teasing that it could gather speed at any moment but never really doing it.

Nonetheless, ‘Valkyrie’ finalizes what Stauffenberg and the men and women of the German resistance set out to accomplish. Even knowing their chances of success in Operation Valkyrie were slim, these people wanted future generations to know that not all Germans were like Hitler. While ‘Valkyrie’ is not a gripping film, it serves this purpose in telling their tale first and foremost.

‘Valkyrie’ is a good film, anything but perfect, but it gets the job done. Its screenplay is clunky and monotone. Its lead actor is anything but the ideal candidate to play that character. However, the superior direction by Singer and the first-rate supporting cast make for a decent telling of a story that should never have been lost in history.

[Overall: 3 stars out of 5]

Ram Man:

So it seems not everyone in Germany during World War II liked the little guy with the goofy mustache (Hitler). ‘Valkyrie’ the new film by Bryan Singer (Xmen) and starring Tom Cruise (Top Gun) is one of the more famous of the numerous attempts to kill the leader of the Nazi party.

‘Valkyrie’ (the code name for the mission)   is a plot by high ranking officers in the German Army to eliminate Hitler, blame it on his personal death squads (the SS) and have the Army take control of Berlin.   Then after that is done they work out a cease-fire with the Allies. The major problem with the plan, other than communication, is they waited until 9 months before the war was to end to do it. The leader of this group was a war hero Col. Claus Von Stauffenburg (Cruise). Von Stauffenberg, a military mind, was having concerns about the war before he was wounded and transfered to the War Dept. in Berlin. There he was introduced to the other conspiritors General Olbricht (Bill Nighy), General Beck (Terence Stamp) and a reluctant General Fromm (Tom Wilkenson).

This small group inacted a plot to have Von Stauffenberg and his  Lieutenant Werner von Haeften ( Jamie Parker) attend a meeting with Hitler in the ‘Wolf’s Lair” (a heavily fortified wooded bunker where Hitler ran the war from as it came to an end) where they would plant a bomb in a brief case and eliminate the lunatic. Then communications would be shut down. Back in Berlin Olbricht would initiate Valkyrie and the army would arrest all of the SS officers and take control of the city. Sounds easy enough huh?

The bomb goes off and Valkyrie is set in motion, and if you didn’t sleep through history you know Hitler didn’t die. The rest of the details and action will have to be seen for yourself when you go check out Valkyrie this holiday season. Yes, a Nazi movie at Christmas, timing could be better. But not everyone wants the warm fuzzy holiday flick at Christmas.

I liked Valkyrie. There had been alot of negative buzz around the film, but the story is historically accurate and is told in an entertaining way. The only problem I had with it was having all of the American and British acotrs playing Germans without any attempt at a German accent. I understand that Singer attempted it but after hearing them the accents hit the cutting room floor.   If you are looking to be entertained and you need to get away from the holiday leftovers go check out a matinee of Valkyrie and find out where other than casting the plot went wrong.

[Overall: 3 out of 5 stars]