Annnd that’s a wrap for movies this month!

Young Washington, 2026.   Watched on opening weekend with the ladyfriend, who indulged my historical asides (“That’s Thomas Gage, he’s going to be an antagonist in twenty years.”)  and and the film’s violence.  Young Washington is a penniless chap with a good family name and nothing else; he joins the Virginia Militia  to prove his mettle and begin making a name for himself a gentleman, but runs into disaster almost immediately.   You only lose if you quit, so Washington takes to the field again as the French & Indian War begins in earnest. I liked the emphasis the film put on the Virginia Militia being Virginians. Moderns really have no idea how strong state identification was in an era when you couldn’t just move on a whim. 

1776, 1972.  Here a Lee, and there a Lee, and everywhere a Lee, a Lee! A musical comedy about the founding of America, produced in advance for the Bicentennial.    I love, love, this movie.  Granted, I’m both a history nut and a lover of musicals,  but it’s SO GREAT. The script is funny, sweet, dramatic…

“Fat George has declared us in rebellion! Why in bloody hell can’t [Congress]?!” 

“‘Treason is a charge invented by winners for an excuse for hanging the losers.’”
“I have more to do than to stand here listening to you quote yourself.”
“Aw, but that was a new one.”

Mr. Hancock:  The principles of independence have no greater advocate in Congress than its president. And that is why I must join those who vote for unanimity.
Mr. Adams:   Good God, John! What are you doing? You’ve sunk us!
Mr. Hancock: Now, hear me out! Don’t you see that any colony who opposes independence will be forced to fight on the side of England? That we’ll be setting brother against brother. That our new nation will carry as its emblem the mark of Cain. I can see no other way. Either we all walk together, or together we must stay where we are.

Mr. Adams: Do you mean to say it is not yet FINISHED?
Mr. Jefferson:   No sir. I mean to say it has not yet begun.
Mr. Adams: Good god! A whole week!  The entire Earth was created in a week!
Mr. Jefferson: Sometime, you must tell me how you did it. 

ADAMS: Well, I’ll never appear in the history books anyway. Only you. Franklin did this, and Franklin did that, and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington – fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them, Franklin, Washington and the horse, conducted the entire revolution all by themselves.
FRANKLIN: [pondering] I like it.

Adams: This is a REVOLUTION, dammit! We’re going to have to offend SOMEBODY! 

Smokey and the Bandit, 1977. A charismatic wildcat trucker known as The Bandit is bet $80,000 (in 1977 money) that he can’t get a truck of Coors beer from Texarkana Tx to Atlanta within a certain time limit.   Unable to resist a challenge, The Bandit hires his trucking buddy Jerry Reed (one of country music’s all-time best gee-tar pickers).   Their idea is simple: The Bandit will steam along in a Trans-Am,   attracting and losing police attention, while Jerry keeps moving the cargo unmolested. (said cargo is illegal: it’s Coors beer, and in 1977 that is bootlegging.)  However, on the way The Bandit picks up a runaway bride, the adorable Sally Field, and her disgruntled almost-father-in-law Sheriff Buford T. Justice  is determined to get her back. He therefore chases The Bandit from Texas to Georgia with great dialogue and property destruction along the way.  As my trucker father told me one of the many times we watched this movie, “This movie sold many a Trans-Am.”    I cannot tell you how many times this son and nephew of truckers has watched this movie, but it’s one of my all-time favorites – what a celebration of good-old fashioned entrepreneurship against government oppression!  Not only is it outrageously entertaining in its own right, it introduced me to the music of Jerry Reed. One huge theme of the movie is that The Bandit is a folk-hero: people know his rig, they know his voice on the CB, and they actually help him on his way – not only  telling him where cops are, but actively interfering in police operations. On an interesting note, this was filmed in ‘76 as I spied Bicentennial decor in a few of the small town filming locations.

Here’s a taste:

Jerry Reed: What’s goin’ on up there? Come back, Bandit? Is she wearing….a wedding dress?
Bandit, watching it fly out the open roof: She was.
Jerry Reed: What’s she got on now, COME BACK?

(The Bandit, screaming along at 130 miles an hour)
Sally Field: You know who I feel has really revolutionized the American theater? Stephen Sondheim.

“The fact that you are a county sheriff is not germane to the situation.”
“The %@$))@ GERMANS GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!”

Like Father, Like Son,  2014. FINALLY, a return to Kore-Eda. I began watching his work at the beginning of the year and was soon distracted. I’ve been watching to go back to him. In this film, two Japanese couples are horrified to find that their sons are not their own; the boys were born on the same day, but swapped somehow in the maternity ward. This was only found out because of blood testing done as part of elementary school applications (?!), and now the families only have a few months to decide what to do. This is a very hard film, emotionally, because we witness two sets of people wrestling with the same question: what makes my son my son? What makes family, family?   Adding to the tension is the fact that these are not interchangeable families:   Ryota and his wife Midori are very materially successful, but their classy penthouse feels like a sterile apartment. Yudai and Yukari are working class (Yudai sells and works on home appliances), but have a very warm home life. Whereas little Keita is more or less being groomed to be a formal little salaryman like Ryota,   little Ryusei is one child among several, and is used to his parents’ constant physical affection and horseplaying.  The Y/Y home is very intimate – the family sleeping together – whereas R/M are more formal. That’s mostly because of Ryota, however, who we find had a father he disapproves of and who has patterned his life to rise above.  This is not a case of “Malfoys bad, Weasleys good,” though, because Yudai is very materialistic in his way: as  warm as he is with the kids, he’s constantly wondering how much they can sack the hospital for. When the families grudgingly try “exchanging the kids” – mostly because of Ryota – things get wrenching. One admirable thing about this is the kid-acting – acting in Kore-eda films is very quiet and understated, and even the children here radiate a lot of inner turmoil.  Ultimately it ends well, but as usual with Kore-Eda you have to travel through the wringer first. 

Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, 2008. Dany Boon. A French postmaster makes a judgement error and is consigned to Nord-pas-de-Calais, the boonies.   He regards it with fear and trembling first, refusing to drag his wife into the frozen wastelands of the North, and when he arrives he expects to find the locals to be illiterate peasants. Although it takes him a while to adjust to their dialect, they’re marvelously friendly people and he soon finds himself much happier than in his previous big-city post – but, because his wife and friends back home expect him to be miserable, he always creates dramatic horror stories of his life up north to make it sound like he’s living in Siberia or something.  As a Southerner, I found this film especially hilarious because of how moronic the urban French’s perceptions of Nord-pas-de-Calais were.  I have literally been asked questions like, “So has anything changed around here since the sixties?” as if we’re still walking around in black and white.   It’s definitely a comedy:  in one scene,  the boss goes on a route with one of his carriers to give him an example of how to say “non!” to residents who invite him in for a drink. The boss winds up very…lubricated. (“Did you see how I turned down that fifth beer, Antoine? Firm! Cordial, but firm!”)   In another, the postmaster’s wife comes to visit him, and he confesses to his friends he’s been telling her stories of his living among barbarians and such, so the villagers decide to take stereotypes up to eleven. It’s hilarious,  and that’s not counting the Americanesque love of gunfire. 

“Why were you drunk on a bicycle?”

“Saying no to  alcohol.”

Truman, 1995.  Gary Sinese plays Harry Truman, a blunt haberdasher from Missoura who gits himself in politics and winds up president.  I’ve been a fan of Sinese since watching Forrest Gump as a kid, so I enjoyed it. Sinese really leans into Truman’s accent. I understand this was based on David McCullough’s epic biography. 

“Whenever the press quits abusing me, I know I’m in the wrong pew.” 

“If Moses had waited on the polls, he’d still be in Egypt!” 

“The hell kind of word is deniability?  I’m just the man holding this office. If I dirty it, the dirt doesn’t leave with me, when I go, it stays and rubs off on whoever comes in after me from now on.”

I REALLY wanted to follow this up with a Sinese double feature in which he plays George C. Wallace: first in Wallace, and then again in Path to War where he plays Wallace in a film dominated by MICHAEL GAMBON AS LBJ. I have Wallace, but the first time I began watching it, I got angry over the pathetic way they portrayed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was not close; it was not close to close. A spider monkey on LSD could have come up with something closer. Anyway, now all my DVDs are in storage and I can’t find it on streaming.

Troy,  2004.   All month I’ve been debating whether or not to watch The Odyssey. In the plus column: Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, who had me sold from the word go;  stabbing;  triremes, or in this case Viking longboats identifying as tritremes.   In the minus column: extremely dodgy casting outside Matt and Anne;  Viking longboats identifying as triremes;   Odysseus reduced from an over-proud warrior to a dude with a case of the gloomies because he’s stabbed a lot of people. No gods, except for grey-eyed Athena who is apparently a hallucination.  The Odyssey being in the news, however, I listened to a multi-part series from The Rest is History on it, and then I listened to Stephen Fry’s The Odyssey, and then I said “Well,  Troy didn’t have gods and I loved it. Didn’t I?”    I needed to find out. I knew, of course, that portions of this movie have seeped into my soul:  Achilles and Hector’s tragic fight,  Achilles “And that is why no one will remember your name,” etc. But I needed to see it. I needed to sail back into the past, when I watched this movie after my western civ professor had made me drunk with love of the great dramas of classical history –   the duel between heroes here,  the Greeks standing at the Gates of Fire, defying the Persians, Athens and Sparta standing back to back and then grappling like Cain and Abel in the mud.  I was enthralled every moment. The part I hate about this movie is that the little worm Paris,  both kills the Mighty Achilles, and lives. In the myths, of course, the wretched diaper dumpling is  slain by the noble Philoctetes, but in this movie he gets off despite his unbridled lust and moral cowardice. As much as I love Eric Bana’s Hector,  murdering Meleanus to save the worm’s life was poor bargain. 

I enjoyed it thoroughly. Um…don’t be surprised if I rewatch 300.  

“Let Achilles fight for honor, let Agamemnon fight for power, and let the gods decide who to glorify.”

“Honor the gods, love your woman,  defend your country. Troy is mother to us all – FIGHT FOR HER!

“Do you know what’s waiting for us, beyond that beach? IMMORTALITY! TAKE IT! IT’s YOURS!”

“The gods envy us because we are mortal. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.” 

Agamemnon: You’ll be a Trojan princess, scrubbing my floors. And at night – 
Briseus: (stab stab stab)
Me: Hey, that’s his wife’s job! Let Clytemnestra do that!

 

The Odyssey, 1997. 

I’ve watched this 2-3 times over the years and always enjoy it: it’s the classic cinematic portrayal of Odysseus’ story. I can’t watch this without some nostalgia, because it takes me back to 9th or 10th grade world lit where we were trying to memorize the Greek and Roman pantheons and the subtle differences between them.  Rewatching this made me wonder if, in high school, our teacher only showed us selections, because the Calypso scenes are a bit risque for a teacher so circumspect she used swear words like “Oh, fudge”. 

The Return, 2024.  Cunning but foolish Odysseus has washed up on the shore of his home kingdom, Ithaca. It has been many years since he reigned here; in his days of being storm toss’d by the gods (gods not included in this movie),   men have descended like locusts on his realm to eat him out of house and home and seize his wife as their own. Odysseus is a broken man; he has lost his men,  been long removed from the meaning of home, and now is haunted by a war whose cruelties he was a participant in – and in the case of the Fall of Troy, the Architect of.  This is not an action movie, but rather an intense psychological study of a man trying to find home again – not physical home, because he arrives there, but a deeper home. Peace. The direction is wonderful, with long focuses on characters like Oydesseus and Penelope whose barely-twitching faces testify to a war within.  Warned by the shade of Agamemnon (whose wife stabbed him in the bath) to exercise caution, Odysseus practices prudence for once.   Enjoyed Ralph Fiennes’ acting as always; did not expect to see his…pilum. 

“Troy could never be taken, only destroyed. We burned it to the ground, and….drowned the flames in blood.”

“We didn’t know the dead were the lucky ones. We survive, but there’s nothing…left inside…”

“You know who I am; tell him.”
“I know who you were.”

What’s coming up? No idea. I am much closer to being willing to watch the new Odyssey, I think. One night when I fell asleep watching the 1990s one, Amazon decided to follow it with Jason and the Argonauts (1963) which I could see if this mythic Greek mood persists. I’ll definitely be watching The Brink of War on release. I don’t think Jeff Daniels will do Reagan any justice (Quaid knocked that one out of the park), but Jared Harris as Gorby and J.K. Simmons in anything? Sign me up.