Pajama Pundits

Having had six full months to recover from hearing Jimmy Smits deliver the line "My wife and I always wanted to adopt a baby girl!" in "The Revenge of the Sith," the Entertainment Curmudgeon was lured by the offer of free tickets and fond memories of the Marlboro Man to go "Bareback Mounting." You know--that current movie everyone's talking about and no red-blooded American male wants to voluntarily go see. The Entertainment Curmudgeon posts the following review but suggests anyone who actually plans to see the movie skip reading because the entire plot will be revealed. Actually, the entire plot is revealed in the trailer, but that's besides the point here.

For the record, let's first clear up one frequent question, as submitted to this columnist by a local fan: Did the Marlboro man actually herd sheep? I don't even recall the Marlboro man being a cowpuncher. Didn't he just kind of pose and stare off, as horses ran wild across the screen?

No, Virginia, the Marlboro Man did not herd sheep. The Marlboro Man's only job was to look Manly and handsome while smoking. In reality, the Marlboro Man, like Shamu, was a group effort. One prominent Marlboro Man died of lung cancer and his widow sued the tobacco company: http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/marlboro.htm

At any rate, the Marlboro Man lives on now as the bane of metrosexuals: http://www.newsline.com.pk/Newsdec2003/cover2dec2003.htm

The boys on Brokeback Mountain were only sheepherders for one season. They began as mini Marlboro Men, about age 19. They were both down on their economic luck. They took the mountain job for an angry white male capitalist type. The work involved taking the capitalist's sheep herd up onto the mountain to graze for the summer and preventing the 25% loss of sheep he sustained the previous year (with nobody guarding them, I guess, coyotes had their own orgy).

The evil capitalist went up on the mountain to deliver some bad news about a death in one of their families and from a distance observed the two young men frolicking together, resulting in a permanent hostile attitude on his part and refusal to hire them for subsequent years. Isn't that just like an angry white male? Was he happy to see the sheep grazing peacefully, unmolested? Nooooooooo ... he has to cop a lifelong attitude.

Tragically, the two youths were forced to go their separate ways and to marry and pursue lives of quiet desperation and reproduction until one couldn't stand it anymore and got in touch with the other after a separation of 4 years. Thereafter, they went on "fishing trips" on the mountain several times yearly. This fantasy tale was immediately ruined for one of the wives when she observed them kissing at their very first reunion. She eventually got a divorce. She was already kind of unhappy with only "getting it" aggressively from behind anyway, but she didn't quite know what to make of that until she saw her husband French kissing his best friend.

One of them now freed from matrimonial bonds, the other was eager to jump his, too, but the first one was extremely homophobic and didn't want to be known as "queer"--some trauma having to do with his father taking him as a child to see what a gang of local good old boys did to two old gents who were living quietly together in their town. "For all I know, my father did it," he muses, revealing the Freudian underpinnings of his obviously damaged psyche.

Meeting periodically on the mountain to frolic in the nude goes on for the next 20 years, at which point the more sensitive of the two, Jack, begins to make some demands because "it's never enough time." Rejected yet again, he is forced to stop in Mexico (on his way back to Texas from Wyoming) to frolic with a homosexual prostitute. Then some married guy in the town where he lives begins to make overtures. Jack is conflicted. Getting it once every six months next to a trout stream, even if from his one true love, isn't quite enough.

There is one more meeting on the mountain at which the homophobic one, Ennis, gets mad at Jack for not being faithful and they go through the "it's never enough time" argument again. Nag, nag, nag!!! "We could have had a good life together," Jack pouts. Yeah, they could have been married, then Jack wouldn't have nagged! Next thing we know, Ennis gets a postcard back marked "deceased." (They communicated about their fishing "dates" via postcards). So Ennis calls his late paramour's wife. She says Jack was changing a tire on a tractor or something and it blew up in his face and he lay there and drowned in his own blood. Ennis envisions Jack getting beaten to death, although it's left vague as to what actually happened. This reviewer suspects that Jack's father-in-law never quite got past being told to sit down and shut up at Thanksgiving. Remember, you heard that here first!

Ennis goes to visit Jack's parents to try to get his ashes to spread on the mountain, as the deceased wished. (At this point, he takes off his hat, proving the Entertainment Curmudgeon's companion's observation that "Ugly guys look a lot better wearing hats.") The late Jack's father is bitter and wants him (the half of him that the parents got, anyway) buried in the family plot. The mom invites Ennis to go up to his dead lover's childhood room. In the closet, he finds a terribly familiar and significant shirt and jacket, with a little blood spattered on the sleeve (Maybe this was from the first time he beat Jack up on the mountain before having sex with him?) and Mom lets him take it home. He hangs the outfit inside a closet door and puts a photo of the mountain over it. It's sort of like a little shrine for him to visit when he's on his 5th beer of the night.

Ennis' own daughter, who has spent the movie trying to get his attention, comes to visit him in his trailer/Jack shrine and announces her impending marriage. We know that an epiphany must have happened because Ennis first says it's roundup time and he'll be out with the herd (he has possibly graduated to cattle by this time?), but then he thinks again and mouths a line worthy of Jimmy Smits: "They'll have to get themselves another cowboy. My little girl is getting married."

Well, if the Entertainment Curmudgeon didn't get an exact quote on that very last line, it's understandable. Bad enough to repeatedly watch men riding, hunting, sheep herding, building campfires, eating beans, smoking, drinking whiskey, etc., etc. ad nauseum, but then the sex scenes were boring, too. However, "Brokeback Mountain" gave the Entertainment Curmudgeon a whole new appreciation for the nuances of cowboy lyrics. We quote here from "Strawberry Roan" by Marty Robbins:

I was hangin' 'round town, just spendin' my time, Out of a job, not earnin' a dime A feller steps up and he said, "I suppose, You're a bronc fighter from looks of your clothes." "You figures me right, I'm a good one," I claim. "Do you happen to have any bad ones to tame?" Said he's got one, a bad one to buck! At throwin' good riders, he's had lots of luck.

I gets all het up and I ask what he pays, To ride this old nag for a couple of days He offered me ten; I said, "I'm your man, A bronc never lived that I couldn't span." He said: "Get your saddle, I'll give you a chance" In his buckboard we hopped and he drives to the ranch I stayed 'til mornin' and right after chuck I stepped out to see if this outlaw can buck.

After reading this early review, I put off seeing The Great Raid. I had originally intended to go last week, but procrastinated because I feared being disappointed.

I wasn't.

The weakness of this film is that the story it tries to tell is too big for one film. In trying to condense three intriguing stories into one film, it ends up portraying them all a bit shallowly. (Or four stories, there's more to the contribution of the Alamo Scouts too.) It’s still a good film, not at all a waste of time or money. You won’t leave the theatre disappointed, but you might leave wanting more.

The film would have to be really horrible for it not to be a somewhat emotional experience for me. My uncle was one of the 11 survivors of the massacre at the Puerto Princesa Prison Camp on Palawan that is briefly depicted at the beginning of this film.

This scene left the impression there were no survivors. Perhaps a third of the prisoners escaped the fire, many making it to the beach where they were shot, and eleven managed to survive. They were rescued by Filipino civilians and guerillas. It was their report that added urgency to the rescue of the prisoners at Cabanatuan.

Given director John Dahl also has a personal connection with the subject of the film, it's not surprising that its overall effect is satisfying:

“My father was in World War II. He was in the Philippines, and so for me it was kind of a great opportunity to learn more about what my father had gone through and what he had experienced.

“My Dad would always tell me, ‘That's Ben Steele. He was in the Bataan Death March.’ As a kid I didn't really know what that was. Once I started working on the film and realized what Ben had gone through, it took on a little bit different meaning for me. I've shown it to Ben several times and ultimately we wanted to get as many things right as we could.” ...

“I guess that one of the things that I'm pleased with is that most of the veterans who've watched it are pleased with the way the Japanese are represented in the movie. We really didn't sugarcoat it too much.”

Complaints about the story being difficult to follow or the characters not being well-developed didn't appear warranted to me, except for the POW Major Gibson. That is perhaps because I had also read Ghost Soldiers, one of the two books on which the film is based. Since I already knew something of the characters’ backgrounds, I probably just didn’t notice. (I plan to read the other book, The Great Raid, which also provided material for the movie, though it got lousy reviews on Amazon.)

The initial scene of the Palawan massacre is not well-developed, though it is visually horrifying. I caught only one line of dialogue from those POWs - why are they making us get in the air raid shelters - or something to that effect. Audience members that missed that line did not understand the significance of the Cabanatuan prisoners being made to dig air raid shelters.

The POW's and their situation were not portrayed as well as they could have been in the movie. Though the brief portrayal of the Palawan massacre, the field of crosses outside Cabanatuan and POWs digging new graves certainly conveys how dire their situation was, what was lacking was the spirit and humanity of the men.

It was a poor choice, I think, to make the lead POW a fictional character when almost all the rest were real people. Trying to capture the the poignant combination of hopelessness and hopefulness, bravery, and humanity of the prisoners in one character resulted in a one-dimensional and sappy portrayal. Reviewers more knowledgeable than I of acting and film making say this is at least partly due to a mismatch of actor and role.

My disappointment in the lack of depth in the portrayal of the POWs may also be due to my familiarity with their story. They did not resemble the men portrayed in Ghost Soldiers. Nor did they resemble the men in Last Man Out, the story of one survivor of the Palawan massacre.

And while the story of Margaret Utinsky and the Filipino underground smuggling medicine into the camp is also an amazing one, the relationship between her and the fictional Major Gibson was simply a distraction. The time spent on the romance would have been better used portraying Claire Phillips, lounge singer and spy. She had a correspondence with a POW (a chaplain) at Cabanatuan, and this may be where the idea of a romance came from.

The movie gets a good grade on historical accuracy - except for the fictional and annoying romance angle and the overly opulent prison quarters and wardrobes.

Though one of the few films to accurately portray the Filipino guerrillas, it didn't really do them justice. Captain Pajota's feat in holding back a 1000 Japanese soldiers with a small force should have had a few more feet of film.

The understated, almost too subtle, dialogue didn't quite make clear that the raid would have been an utter failure without the tactical brilliance of Captain Pajota and the participation of his men. Captain Joson - who might be missed entirely in the film if you're not paying close attention - was indeed overshadowed by Pajota, but still essential to the success of the operation.

The best performances in this film are by the Filipino actors. Cesar Montano portrays Captain Pajota with quiet strength and Natalie Mendoza as Mina, who helped smuggle medicine into the camp, is beautiful as well as talented.

The neatest bit of trivia about the actors is that Ebong Joson thought it merely coincidence that he shared the same name as his character. He did not find out until after accepting the role, that he would be portraying his grandfather.

Others on The Great Raid: Instapundit

Big Ten Extra - Great Raid, Great Movie?

Hoystory.com - The Great Raid

Power Line - Mass Murder One Atrocity at a Time

The Manifest - The "Great" Raid. Partially in English, enough to understand this Phillippine blogger thinks the Filipino role was understated too.

elpeezee - Bringin It Back- Randomly Thinking. Notes that the Japanese killed villagers as punishment for the raid.

Cindyfilms - Skip It

blackshama's blog - The Great Raid and War Movies in general

Nate's Daily News - The Weekend Movie Review. He gives it 8.5 out of 10.

marygraceguerra - guerra means war

ThoughtsOnline

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers! (This makes MY day!)

UPDATE: Gaze Theory relates then to now.

UPDATE: Dave at Garfield Ridge thinks Fiennes' was the best performance in the film.

Yet another UPDATE: Professor Froward says "It's a movie, not a seminar."

I haven't seen all the spy movies Ace lists, but he's so right on his number one pick (and for the right reasons too!) that I'll trust his judgment on the ones I haven't seen.

And he's right about Robert Redford too.