Bryce Zabel's MOVIE SMACKDOWN!

Defiance (2008) -vs- Valkyrie (2008)

Super Jews and Good Germans Take On the Nazis

The Smackdown. It’s Academy Award-worthy season, and you know what that means! Nazis! The multiplex is practically teeming with them. "Valkyrie" served them up for Christmas, and "Defiance" held it's own limited New Year's Eve release to qualify for awards season. Meanwhile, "The Reader" sneaked into a few theaters as well, waiting for its big push in January. Why, you ask, are the Nazis still cinema's all-purpose go-to bad guys? Silly Goosesteppers, you know why. Because everybody hates the Nazis, even the Germans! (Not all Germans, just the ones in “Valkyrie.") For your cinematic Nazi-hating pleasure, it’s “Defiance” against “Valkyrie” as we re-fight World War Two, the war everybody loves starring the villains everybody still loves to hate.

The Challenger. “Defiance” is an earnest piece of work, based on the true story of three Jewish brothers who escape Nazi-occupied Poland to hide in the Belarussian forest where they join the Russian resistance fighters and build a semi-safe haven for over a thousand other exiled Jews. There are a lot of characters in “Defiance.” Most of the exiled Jews are little more than unindividuated dress extras; we learn precious few of their stories or names. They fall into two categories – the gratefully compliant and the nasty rebels. Daniel (James Bond) Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie (Billy Elliott) Bell play the least likely looking brothers since “Twins” Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schreiber has made a career of playing Jewish… Craig not so much.

Gran Torino (2008) -vs- The Shootist (1976)

Does Who You've Killed Make You Who You Are?

The Smackdown. Rumor has it that "Gran Torino" will be the last film that Clint Eastwood acts in.  In it, he basically plays a version of his tough-guy screen characters (think Harry Callahan) who, at the end of his life, has to deal with the fact that so much of who he is derives from who he's killed.  Thirty-two years ago, another tough guy -- John Wayne -- acted in his last film, "The Shootist," where he also played a character who, at the end of his life, had to deal with the violence that had surrounded his days on Earth.  Both of these legendary tough-guys are portrayed as being brought down by disease, having cheated the bloody ravages they've inflicted on others, as they close out their screen personas in projects that say as much about their full careers as the actual films of the moment.  Lending weight to the efforts is that added fact that both of these films parallel the goodbye to these iconic characters by playing them out against times that are changing:  Detroit for Eastwood and the Wild West for Wayne. 

 

The Challenger.  In what may be his swan song to acting, Clint Eastwood directs himself in "Gran Torino."  He plays Walt Kowalski, a tormented Korean War vet and a character with a lot of relevance today, given that he's also a retired auto plant worker, still living in Detroit and wondering where and when it was that the whole thing fell apart.  After his wife dies, it's just Walt, the family he really doesn't connect with, and the next door neighbors who are all Hmong immigrants.  The story was written, not by some A-lister, but by Nick Schenk, a Minnesota wannabe who wrote the whole thing with pen and paper sitting in a bar, and then had Eastwood pretty much shoot every damn word of it.  Part of what attracted Eastwood, no doubt, is how beautifully it allows him to give us a reprise of the Dirty Harry character, but wrap it in a bloody bow of human redemption at the same time.  The narrative has Walt at his peevish best, hurling insults at the neighbors and his family, only to find himself in an odd-friendship with the Hmong kid next door who he catches trying to steal his prized Gran Torino, a car he himself had a hand in making back in the day when Detroit ruled the world.  Yet violence and gangs prevent the film from being just a sweet or comic story of friendship:  this is Clint's farewell to a character-type and he needs to go out in a way that pays off how he got in this world in the first place.  I'll say no more on that score...

Diner (1982) -vs- The Apartment (1960)

Celebrate the New Year's Eve Classics!

The Smackdown. There are a surprising number of worthwhile New Year’s Eve-themed films to consider watching should other more social-type plans fail to materialize for you. I’m no drinker, no party animal; subsequently, New Year’s Eve has always been something of a non-starter. Usually, I stay home and watch a movie or two. Or three. In doing so, I figure my odds on dealing with drunk drivers are infinitesimally small. I have chosen a few of my own personal favorites to recommend because in so doing I could justify re-watching them. I’ve even concocted some fuzzy holiday math for you. We’re celebrating the New Year, 2009. "The Apartment" ends on New Year’s Eve 1959 as does 1982’s "Diner." So…if you don’t pay terribly close attention to my slightly fudged calculations, it’s fifty years. That’s practically a golden anniversary. After half a century of social upheaval, what’s really changed? More importantly, what film’s most worth revisiting for a truly happy start to your new year?

The Challenger. Barry Levinson’s autobiographical Valentine to Baltimore Bromance, "Diner" introduced an absolutely stellar ensemble cast including Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Tim Daly, Paul Reiser, and Ellen Barkin. Five young men on the cusp of adulthood ease the pain of their imminent passage by clinging together and hanging out. All the character-revealing action (and there’s plenty) takes place over a holiday break between Christmas and New Year’s 1959. The dialogue is brilliant and convincingly real; it has the easy improvisational feel of eavesdropping on conversation. The performances are uniformly excellent. Levinson had been writing for television and films for fifteen years before this, his big directing breakthrough. He subsequently returned to his Baltimore roots a few more times with "Avalon" and "Tin Men" and "Liberty Heights." It’s proven fertile creative ground for him and for his audience.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) -vs- Forrest Gump (1994)

Separated at Birth?

The Smackdown.  Walking out of "Forrest Gump" in 1994, I remember thinking to myself that they ought to make more films like it.  A decade and a half later they've done just that and it's called "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."  Both touching films are huge accomplishments in story, direction, effects and general envelope-pushing that owe a common source for their originality to screenwriter Eric Roth.  This time he's gone back further in time from Gump's baby-boomer adventures to Button's that span the years from World War I to present day.  Both leading men are blank-slates who seem to end up (Zelig-like) in the middle of big events where their voice-over is used to lead us through the narrative.  The movies also take place in the South, share a female free-spirit love interest, a strong single mom, and folk wisdom "catch phrases."  Does "Button" build on "Gump" or is it just a pale imitation?  That's the Smack attack here.

The Challenger.  "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" owes its concept to the famous remark by Mark Twain that the best part of life comes at the beginning and the worst at the end, and a short story that F. Scott Fitzgerald made out of it in 1921.  The film takes just the essence, though, and tells a new story entirely.  Basically, it's about a baby born on the day World War I ends who is biologically a very old man and who grows younger day by day.  It's a wonderful "what-if" to contemplate, down to the possibility that Button (Brad Pitt) could meet the love of his life when he's an old man and she's a kid, have a love affair when they're about the same age, and then end up with her as an old woman taking care of him when he's just a child.  The scope director David Fincher brings to the screen is large: from its WWI beginning, the film takes us all the way to modern times and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

War Of The Worlds (2005) -vs- Independence Day (1996)

From the Editor:  Humans must either have a self-esteem problem or just a paranoid mind-set but, in either case, there’s a constant stream of Hollywood films where aliens have to come and kick our butts.  As you’ll see from the polls at the bottom of this post, our global Smackdown staff managed to come up with twenty of them for you to vote on without even breaking a sweat.  As the world braces for the re-make of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” we asked SmackRef Rodney Twelftree to put the two with the biggest box office so far in the ring together.  Thanks, Bryce...

The End of the World as We Know It... Again

The Smackdown.  If you had to choose death from above, would you pick the green lasers, or the blue beams of destruction?  It's "Alien versus Alien" today, technology against technology, human victory against germ warfare, as the horrific events of Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise's "War of The Worlds" come up against the Roland Emmerich and Will Smith juggernaut of "Independence Day."  Both alien attackers are silent and oblivious to the pitiful cries of humanity as they systematically annihilate us.  If only they'd lived in the same cosmic neighborhood, maybe we'd have been spared their plans for global extermination.  But they both got off a clean shot at us and now it's pay-back time: into the SmackRing they go!

The Challenger from Mars. Starring a wounded Tom Cruise (who had, at the time this film was released, only recently jumped upon Oprah’s couch and made an utter knob of himself...) as the “everyman” Ray, who thinks only of himself, "War Of The Worlds" was a remake of the 50’s sci-fi classic, complete with lumbering tripod machines causing untold devastation on our planet. Alien's come to Earth and proceed to rise up from beneath the ground, obliterating everything and everyone with their deadly blue rays of destruction. Ray and his kids must make a harrowing journey from his home in New Jersey to Ray's ex-wife's home to escape the marauding invaders, however, this proves exceptionally difficult as humanity breaks down around them when the aliens pursue humans into the far flung corners of the planet. Spielberg took the premise of the original cult classic, amped it up to 11 and unleashed it upon a fear-ridden, anxiety-prone human world, tapping into the palpable tension around the globe in this current political and social climate. Proving to be a commercial juggernaut, "War Of The Worlds" rewrote the book on just how terrifying an full on attack from the stars could be.