The writer of Charley’s War has said OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR! (1969) is his favorite anti-war film so I watched it last weekend. While Francois Truffaut argued you can’t make an anti-war film that doesn’t end up making war look exciting and cool, I think this one pulls it off.
Based on a successful stage show, this starts with the diplomats and leaders of pre-war Europe watching Austria move into the Balkans following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, all the while agreeing that a continent-wide war would be a bad thing but there’s zero chance of that (I suspect the playwright has read Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, which emphasizes how optimistic Europe was about the looming conflict). Then we bounce around from music-hall numbers to soldiers in the field to the high command scoffing that the body counts aren’t an issue to more music … one reason it works, I think is that we see very little actual war footage and most of that is people getting shot and dying so there’s little on-screen heroism. With a cast that includes Colin Farrell, Ian Holm, Juliet Mills, Gerald Sim, Anthony Ainley, Edward Fox, Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, Jack Hawkins, Kenneth More, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Maggie Smith and John Mills. “So many women look depressing in mourning.”
FLOW (2024) is a Latvian animated film in which a terrified cat fleeing a flood winds up on a boat with a secretary bird, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur and a golden lab (mixing animals from multiple continents didn’t bother me as much as imagining how full of poop the ship would become). A good-looking film that mercifully doesn’t kill any of its protagonists, though the cat’s frightened meows were hard for me to take; there’s one scene that feels baffling (TYG described it as The Assumption of the Secretary Bird) — would it make more sense if I were Latvian? A terrific film, in any case.
As I mentioned yesterday, I did an article this week on local resident and documentary producer Joedan Okun. That led me to watch his Grammy-winning AMERICAN SYMPHONY (2023) about a year in the life of Jon Batiste as he writes a symphony during a year-long Carnegie Hall residency and he and his wife Suleika Jaouad deal with her leukemia recurring. I have no knowledge of Batiste’s work (like a lot of old people, I don’t keep up with current music, though I have downloaded one of his albums on iTunes) but I enjoyed his discussions of how classical music isn’t seen as a black thing (“Our levels of achievement are diminished — they’re not seen as part of the canon.”) and the warm portrayal of the couple’s relationship (her cancer does go back into remission), which Okun said hadn’t been part of the original concept for the film. Streaming on Netflix if you’re curious. “What we love about music is that it feels inevitable.”
The first episode of the French cop show HPI tells how Morgane (Audrey Fleurot), a genius intellect who works as a cleaning woman, spots clues in a murder case that detectives Karadec (Mehdi Nebbou) and Hazan (Marie Denarnaud) don’t. They think she’s full of it but when it turns out she’s right she gets a new gig working as consultant on their investigations.
Like a lot of cop shows I watch, I’m not sure this is better than other series out there but it’s fun, Morgane’s deductions are clever and now I’m attached enough to the characters to keep watching. “We’ve got our Keyzer Soze!”
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