and my soul is in cathay

Broken Flowers & The Great Raid

I saw Broken Flowers last night. I was really looking forward to it. It's not hard for me, as an Emerson student, to get excited about a Bill Murray movie. Somehow, Bill Murray has mastered the middle-age depressed character, and this movie was no exception. So the premise is that Bill Murray gets an anonymous letter from a former flame saying that he has a son who is looking for him. He goes around the country, visiting some interesting characters (including an 'animal communicator,' and the daughter of a fling who likes to walk around naked and is named Lolita).

No one tells him about any son, and he goes home. This is pretty much how it ends. Seriously. I got so excited about it, and I was waiting for him to find out whether or not he actually had a son and then... credits. The movie did not have an ending. I'm gonna explain more about it in white text (just highlight the following text to read): He goes home, and scares off a kid he thinks may be his son, but he never introduces himself! He offers to buy the kid a sandwich, and tries to figure out what he's doing, but never asks "What are you doing here?" or "I'm Bill Murray, could you be my son?" This is the logical way to approach this. So after that kid runs away, he sees another guy in a VW Bug who just kinda looks at him. Then credits. You know, all this movie needs is a ten second shot of him walking up to his door and there's some kid sitting on the doorstep. That's all it needed! That's it!! In any case, I am firm in the belief that movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end. This one only got two of those three parts in.

What surprised me most was how many product placements there were. The movie was made by Focus Features which, incidentally, is the movie studio I want to work for most. Here are the placements:
+ MSN Hotmail
+ Mercedes
+ Volkswagen
+ Mapquest (prominent)
+ Northwest Airlines
+ Calvin Klein (verbal)
+ Budget Rental Cars
+ Ford Taurus (prominent, verbal)
+ Porsche (verbal)
+ Nokia

Mapquest was heavily used for the road trip portions, and Bill Murray drove a Ford Taurus every time he rented a car. Another strange thing was how Jim Jarmusch shot the driving around scenes. There was a lot of weird POV from the driver's seat, and a lot of shots out the side window and with a reflection onto the side mirror.

Anyhow, there's a lot of pseudo-intellectual crap on IMDB board about how "existential" the ending is, about how life isn't really satisfying, that kind of pretentious movie talk. The fact of it is, Jim Jarmusch made a movie that didn't end. It didn't. And it left me so completely disappointed, that I promptly went out and bought a ticket to go see The Great Raid, just to make up for it.

So I went to go see The Great Raid. And it was awesome! According to IMDB, this production has been in hell for the last two years - made but not distributed due to the Miramax / Disney split. The plot outline, courtesy of IMDB, reads: Set in the Philippines in 1945, THE GREAT RAID tells the true story of the 6th Ranger Battalion, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci (Benjamin Bratt) who undertake a daring rescue mission against all odds. Traveling thirty miles behind enemy lines, the 6th Ranger Battalion aims to liberate over 500 American prisoners-of-war from the notorious Cabanatuan Japanese POW camp in the most audacious rescue ever.

Anyhow, the movie was wonderful. It startles me that I never learned about this incredibly successful raid in history class or anything. It seems like such a wonderful story to tell, and I'm glad that it was finally told. My dad told me that he had just read the book it was based on. When he was in the army, he was a Ranger. Even though he never saw action (I love saying that phrase... 'saw action'), I told him that I like to pretend that's the kinda stuff he would do. In any case, I loved the movie. One of the biggest complaints I've read about is that the treatment of the POWs by the Japanese was significantly worse. The movie was pretty graphic in its depiction of the torture, which I won't go into detail about here, but still. So... in closing... go see The Great Raid.

posted by Gillian @ 6:02 PM