[Frederica-l] NRO: "All the King's Men" and "Flyboys"

[Frederica at aol.com]

Two movies opened last Friday, but I forgot to send the reviews to this list! 

here are the URLs for those who prefer to read it on my website: 

http://www.frederica.com/writings/all-the-kings-men.html

http://www.frederica.com/writings/flyboys.html

I made mistakes in both reviews, which readers at NRO have politely pointed 
out. I criticized "Kings Men" for a microphone boom being visible in some 
shots, but have been told that this is the fault of the projectionist, not the 
filmmaker. 

and in "Flyboys" I said that its a bit "over the top" for a character to keep 
a lion as a pet, but apparently that's authentic; two cubs were kept by the 
Americans in the Lafayette Escadrille, named "Whiskey" and "Soda". 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette_Escadrille

Here are the two reviews, pasted in below. 

***

All the King's Men
 
In 1946 Robert Penn Warren published a novel, "All the King's Men," which 
took Louisiana governor Huey P. Long as the inspiration for Willie Stark, a 
strong-minded Southern agrarian politician of the 30's. Willie's story is told by 
his assistant, a more complex and ambivalent man, Jack Burden. Quite a story it 
is, involving lost loves, gunshot wounds, skullduggery, and finding out who 
somebody's *real* father is. The novel won the Pulitzer, and the 1949 film 
version won three Oscars, so it must have seemed like a brilliant idea to do a 
remake. Pile on the big-name actors, spread a thick layer of thunderous music and 
dramatic lighting, and grab a basket for the posies that will be coming your 
way. 
 
Even better, because the setting of this story is the duplicitous world of 
politics, it can be made to point to our President or, confusingly, just about 
anybody else. It was James Carville who initially suggested to producer Mike 
Medavoy that his favorite novel was due for a remake (Carville gets an executive 
producer credit). Early in the film, shoddy construction of a school causes 
three children to die in a fire; in a New York Times feature, Carville points 
out that this kinda sounds like those levees last year. And director Steven 
Zallian explains how a reporter connected the dots from W to Willie Stark: "a 
character who becomes sure of himself and runs roughshod over the judiciary, the 
arrogance of power." On the other hand, Willie expresses strong beliefs, and 
that reminds Zallian of how he wished Al Gore had been more outspoken in 2004. 
And a voice on the soundtrack that says "Get the gun" during the opening 
credits comes from a recording made at the scene of RFK's assassination. 
 
Well, that's straightened out. All that's left is to take in the story, which 
is not as easy as it sounds because Sean Penn, as Willie, rumbles and slurs 
in a parody of southern backwoods patter that you have to think about for a 
moment and mentally translate. Penn is a terrific actor (in this film, especially 
when he's swaying and shouting through drunken speeches), but the accent 
suits him like a bad toupee (speaking of, why the Lyle Lovett hair?). I say this 
as a native southerner. I have heard a lot of accents across the south. I grew 
up in Charleston. I have lived in New Orleans. I never encountered anything 
like Mr. Penn's accent outside of movies like this. 
 
Jude Law does no better in the role of Jack Burden. Granted, his southern 
accent is more comprehensible, but it's less believable, and he's just wrong for 
the part to start with. Jack is burdened, all right, a perceptive character 
with plenty of troubles, and Jude is just too pretty. He's even prettier than 
Kate Winslett is here, which seems impossible. Kate, as childhood friend and 
sometime sweetheart Ann Stanton, wears thick black eyebrows and a wavy blonde 
mane. Winslett is a beautiful woman, but somehow the combination is heavy and 
graceless.
 
Patricia Clarkson is wonderful, as always, as Sadie Burke, and James 
Gandolfini is delectable as Tiny Duffy. Jackie Earle Haley is perfect in the virtually 
non-speaking role of Sugar Boy. Mark Ruffalo makes a game attempt at 
portraying Adam Stanton, but we don't get to see much of him, and this absence 
unbalances the plot. He may have been trimmed back too far in Director Zallian's 
attempts to get the story across more clearly. The film was due to be released 
last December, but test audiences left confused about the plot and characters' 
relationships to each other (and some details are still foggy to me). 
    
If it doesn't sound like enough big names yet, add Anthony Hopkins as Judge 
Irwin, probably the most effective and engaging member of the cast. In general, 
it's just too many big names bumping into each other and failing to mesh 
well. What isn't accomplished on the screen is handed over to the soundtrack, and 
it labors and mourns and swells and shimmers as required, strong-arming the 
audience's emotions like one of Willie's goons. 
 
And for all that grandiosity, there are some goofy mistakes. The boom mike 
descends into the frame several times during a couple of climactic scenes. (This 
may be a dumb question, but if you can CGI in a monster, why can't you CGI 
out a mike?) When Jack goes to dig up dirt on a Savannah character, he is seen 
in a government office looking through a tome of "South Carolina Civil Suits." 
And another thing: southerners don't call carbonated drinks "pop" -- maybe 
"soda" or "coke" or "soft drinks," but not "pop." And there weren't clusters of 
roadside memorial crosses in the 1950's. And the widow Littlepaugh has *way* 
too many candles and crosses going on; the designer doesn't seem to understand 
how these elements are actually used in a devout life. She has a whole 
collection of altar crosses, as if she has been sneaking into churches at off hours 
and making away with them. And my sharp-eyed seminary graduate companion noted 
that the pastor at the funeral service is reading from a Book of Common Prayer 
with unlikely thumb tabs; if it's meant to be a Bible, he's reading the Gospel 
of John in the Old Testament. And the chaplain opens the state legislative 
session with a prayer anachronistically addressed to God as "You," not "Thee." 
 
And don't get me started on those accents again. 

*****

Flyboys
 
War movies are the Dinty Moore Beef Stew of cinema: meat, potatoes, coupla 
carrots, and no surprises. You got your dashing-but-human cowboy, the center of 
the story. You got your noble African-American. You got your clean-cut fellow 
who will at some point go, sweating and trembling, into shock. You got your 
plump, condescending child of privilege. And you got your enigmatic 
battle-hardened hero, who appears as if from the shadows, speaks lines that are somehow 
both cryptic and blunt, and then retreats. In this movie, he has a pet lion, 
which might push things over the top a bit.
 
If this is the kind of movie you relish, "Flyboys" will hit the spot. It 
comes from director Tony Bill, who has a long string of credits as an actor and a 
director of TV movies, and made his biggest splash as producer of "The Sting" 
back in 1973. James Franco, a James Dean look-alike (memorable as Spiderman's 
jealous friend Harry Osborne) heads the cast, which is hardly overwhelmed by 
stars - probably a good thing for an ensemble story like this. The screening 
audience greeted the closing credits with applause, and this was preceded by the 
sound of grown men sniffling. 
 
You know what - it *is* a stirring story. Perhaps there is no way to tell it 
that doesn't sound familiar, because heroes everywhere have some things in 
common. 
 
The story is that of the Lafayette Escadrille. Before the U.S. entered WW I, 
some American men traveled to France in order to enlist as fighter pilots. The 
plane was a recent invention, and flying involved its own real dangers even 
when no one was shooting at you. (The movie takes place in 1916, eleven years 
before Lindbergh's Atlantic flight.) At one point, two characters have a 
conversation about whether there will be any future in flying after the war. 
 
The film follows a group of young volunteers as they leave their homes and 
arrive at the training field in Marseilles. The only one who speaks French is 
the African-American, who has been following a career as a boxer in Paris. The 
training process, in that time before simulators, is sometimes quite simple; in 
one exercise, the men are spun around in a chair until they're dizzy and then 
they try to walk a straight line. 
 
A good bit of the story takes place in the air, as good-guy and enemy planes 
weave around each other, the pilots shooting and evading and coping with 
mechanical problems (each has been given a hammer for hitting the mounted gun when 
it jams). The cockpits are open, and battling pilots can pull up alongside and 
give each other the once-over, like drag-strip challengers at a stop light. 
However, since everyone wears a leather helmet and goggles, it's sometimes hard 
to identify just which hero is onscreen. The air battles are gorgeous to 
watch, and you can see that the ballet fascinates the pilots as well, because when 
they're on the ground they're often replicating the action manually, one hand 
soaring after another. It's both satisfying and scary to watch planes 
collapse in the air, fall apart, and plummet. 
 
The showpiece of the film is a battle with a German dirigible. This is in the 
trailer, so I don't think I give anything away by revealing that it ends when 
a crippled good-guy plane deliberately flies into the hydrogen-filled blimp. 
The progress of flames ripping through the stages of the craft is awesome to 
watch, but I found that the sight of a plane flying into a structure and 
exploding it still has too many unfortunate echoes to stand alone as a film event. 
 
Plenty of stuff happens on the ground, too. The cowboy meets a pretty young 
Frenchwoman who is caring for her orphaned niece and nephews. Neither of them 
speak the other's language, and their romance, though predictable, is not 
cloying. The characters who, at the beginning of the film need to learn a lesson, 
learn the lesson they need. The ones who need to find courage, find it. Every 
thread of the plot proceeds in time-honored stately fashion, and all elements - 
acting, lighting, writing, sets - serve a united purpose (the music is a bit 
bombastic, but maybe that's appropriate for the genre). 
 
This movie is admirable on its own terms, as a fine example of its genre, but 
if it's not your cup of tea you may well be bored before the whole 139 minute 
production unrolls.  But if you go knowing what you're getting into, you'll 
have a fine time. 

********
Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com
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