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2022

Where The Crawdads Sing – 0 stars

April 27, 2023
0 stars, 2022, Drama
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Treacle and cornpone to its very core, an exercise in nostalgic tedium. Reese Witherspoon loved the book, a story of murder and mystery and coming of age in the swamps of a North Carolina small town. So the movie got made, in exactly the vein and manner of this vacuous and generic interview with the producer. 

Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Under the Banner of Heaven) is Kaya, one of a kabillion kids living in the marsh with her abusive father and helpless mother. Soon, the mother ups and leaves (Kaya yells “Mommy, Mommy” but as is the style in this type of Southern gothic turdpile, Mom sleepwalks down the misty driveway, never looking back). Kaya’s siblings soon follow (one of whom basically tells 9 year old Kaya “stay low” to survive just before he abandons her). Then her father splits, and Kaya is consigned to a life alone as the spooky swamp girl. Mind you, for the rest of her life (and when we leave her, she is in her mid-twenties), not one of her siblings circles back to see if, maybe, their little sister is ok. Her serviceman brother does a perfunctory drop-in later, when she is on trial for murder, meaning he was an adult for 12 or so years and couldn’t be bothered.  

The film’s version of 1960s rural poverty is to the real McCoy what the Disney ride is to actual pirates in the Caribbean. You soon suspect the swamp girl is derided by the locals not for her foreign and mysterious ways, or any class condescension, but rather, for her stunning cheekbones, luminous skin, and pearly white teeth.

The entire feel is inauthentic, as if brought to you by Loew’s or Home Depot. The swamp feels more like a fern bar, the town like Smallville, the characters every single archetype you’ve seen before.

We even get Kaya’s ponderous voiceover telling us things we can plainly see, half Marlin Perkins, half Judy Blume.

Kaya grows up and is caught in a tepid love triangle between two disinteresting homogenous actors with the mien of reality tv star brothers who macrame.

Could this be a double murder? Oh to dream!

Sadly, no. Kaya goes on trial for the murder of only Siegfried, not Roy, and perhaps the most boring legal drama in filmic history ensues. The case is so weak, you expect the actor playing the prosecutor to turn to the camera and shrug in apology. Kaya’s defense attorney (David Strathairn) shreds all witnesses with easy politeness, stopping just short of patting them on the head at the conclusion of his cross examination.

With the verdict a foregone conclusion, the reveal (she did/did not do it!) is anticlimactic in the extreme, made worse by the filmmakers’ decision to withhold “how” she did or did not do it.  

It’s all clearly too much for director Olivia Newman, who had some TV episodes on her resume’, to handle. She can’t settle in on any one aspect of the story (the disconnect between town and swamp, the thriller, the abandonment and solitude, the love stories) with any depth so we get a steamed, soggy pu pu platter of platitudinous porridge. The fact that the dull screenplay was written by Beasts of the Southern Wild co-writer Lucy Alibar is both confounding and depressing.

In the end, Kaya becomes a big star. Music swells. Crawdads sing. Cursing of Reese Witherspoon’s reading habits follows.  

On Netflix.

Vengeance – 4.5 stars

April 10, 2023
2022, 4 stars, Comedy, Drama
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BJ Novak‘s black comedy nicely straddles the line between laugh-out loud funny and acerbically insightful. Ultimately, a culture class vehicle, the film also hits every one of its marks in blue and red America.

Ben Manalowitz (Novak) is a NYC writer who longs to host a hot transformative podcast, a vessel for his views of America. When we meet him, he is so hiply ironic and up his own butt, there’s not a lot to root for. But we do, because he seems adrift and in struggle for meaning. Once you get past all his posturing, he also seems decent, if weak.

Novak’s Ben reminds me of Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath in Girls, a clearly unsympathetic protagonist shown in an unflattering light who still manages to elicit empathy. Novak skewers himself mercilessly (shout out to John Mayer, whose one scene with Novak is a hilarious, ostentatious riff between two “bro’s” that introduces Ben and what he is about with economical precision), but stops short of the cartoonish, offering a balanced portrayal of a narcissistic guy with bite-sized intellectual pretensions who also wants to be a good dude.

When Ben gets a call from a distraught man in Texas telling him that his sister and Ben’s girlfriend Abilene is dead, it takes Ben a minute to realize that she was just one of his many occasional hookups, one who must have told her family that he was her steady boyfriend back in the city.  Ben takes an extra beat to see a trip to Texas for Abilene’s funeral as an opportunity to immerse himself in some of the America he waxes so philosophically about. Upon arrival, a hot podcast is born.

Ben is the quintessential fish-out-of-water, and in lesser hands, the film would have had little to say about the cultural divide while maximizing the pratfalls and faux pas of a NYC Jew in shitkicker county. Or, the picture would have jettisoned the funny for deep intonement about the state of our current national fracture, such as it is. 

Novak smartly balances both elements while crafting a genuine connection he makes with Abilene’s family.  A scene where Ben attends a rodeo is gut-busting, another where he interviews Abilene’s record producer (an impressively soulful Ashton Kutcher) is thought-provoking and intelligent, and the deeper his dive into fly-over country, the funnier and more meaningful the picture becomes. Novak takes hard, amusing, and accurate shots at everyone’s station with a humility that elevates the movie.   

The picture suffers just a bit at the end from repetition (a little Ashton Kutcher goes a long way) and a discordant, implausible cherry on the top, but no matter.  Very sharp, very tight, highly recommended.                   

On Amazon Prime.

Blonde – 1 star

March 12, 2023
1 star, 2022, Drama, Historical
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Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is one of the best films of the last 25 years and would rank in my own top 25 of all time.  So, no matter the negative notices, any of his pictures merits a look.

Blonde received scads of poor notices.  Justifiably so.

The picture has much in common with Elvis, and you get the sense that Dominik, like Baz Luhrmann, was behind the eight-ball from the outset.  Both biopics are devoted to broad pop icons with fixed public personas that, when pierced, reveal soft, dull goo.  So, the directors make up for the deficit by untethering the stories from fact, gussying up the visuals, and stretching for a larger point. As with Elvis, we quickly learn a good-looking picture can only get you so far.

Make no mistake.  Blonde is a visual feast. But it has no real narrative. We meet poor Norma Jean as a child brutalized by her mentally ill mother, and then she’s brutalized via casting couch, and then she seeks shelter in a “throuple” with two men, who take advantage of her sexually and financially. Soon, Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) shows up out of nowhere, and then Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), and then JFK, and soon, drugs and death. One calamity after another, one torment replacing another. None of her relationships are developed. Rather, her romantic entanglements just appear, are thunderstruck, and then we move to the next victim/victimizer.

It is all very sad, but watching a film is transactional, and you soon wonder, “Why am I supposed to care?”

Ana de Armas as Marilyn is occasionally effective (in particular, during a riveting audition), but for the most part, she’s a cartoon, cooing “Daddy” (to her own, unknown father and every man she has chosen to replace him) in a breathy, childlike manner at such a rate that you can almost see DiMaggio and Miller thinking, “Yikes! I thought the ditzy bombshell thing was an act? How do I get myself out of this?”

de Armas was nominated for best actress, and much like Natalie Portman in Jackie, the rendition is an over-the-top caricature of a public figure, where their peculiar tics are amplified. When her Cuban accent makes one of many appearances, it doesn’t really bother.  There’s just too much else wrong with the performance, as if someone told de Armas to play Marilyn as a perpetual thirteen year old girl. With a concussion.  

Not that de Armas was given much to work with.  In one scene, she is with the none-too-impressed DiMaggio women, who are making spaghetti, and she lilts, “ooooh … real spaghetti? Like . . . not from a store?”

There’s plenty more where that came from in this ridiculous script. At the premiere of her first big film, as the crowd erupts in thunderous applause for the town’s new star, Marilyn breathily says, out loud, “For this, I killed my baby.”

Hoo boy.

Dominik’s missteps can also be traced to his misunderstanding of Monroe in the American consciousness: “If you spent 70 years enjoying a fantasy of a person; then a movie comes along that says she was not complicit in your enjoyment, it puts you in an uncomfortable position for having enjoyed it. People don’t want to be put in that position; they want her to be the one that created their enjoyment, and was along for the ride, then had a bad year and killed herself. That’s not the way it works. There’s no redemption in suicide. Americans don’t like you to monkey with their mitts too much. They very often want to jump to the solution without looking at any of the trauma.”

I am not unreceptive to some of these observations, but as applied to Monroe, Dominik is just wrong,  He is talking about the Monroe of Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” which was so long ago (1973, only 11 years after Monroe’s death) the song has been repurposed for Lady Diana (and will eventually be repurposed again when the next pop starlet dies before her time). Americans are not so protective of Monroe that Dominik’s pedestal tipping would elicit a reflexive defense.  Rather, in modern memory, she was a sexy, mentally disturbed, marginal actress who sang a sultry “Happy Birthday, Mr. President!” publicly and privately and then overdosed. Side note: has anyone been taken down further in filmic history than JFK? When I grew up, he was the cool, collected president who saved his mates in PT 109 and stared down the Russians in The Missiles of October. Recently, in The Crown, he was a pill-popping whirling dervish.  Here, he’s a #MeToo emblem, forcefully cajoling Monroe to perform oral sex on him in what has to be the worst scene in the picture.            

I suspect Dominik knows the film fails, but credit him for a stout defense: ”Blonde is a very well worked-out film. Those who don’t think that aren’t watching it. If you sit back and trust that the movie knows what it’s doing, it’ll work.”         

It does not. But if you are hot for a visually impressive, near 3-hour movie about a glamorous, vapid punching bag, Blonde is streaming on Netflix.  

Fire of Love – 5 stars

February 27, 2023
2022, 5 stars, Documentary
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Katia and Maurice Krafft were world-famous scientists who started studying active volcanos up close and personal in the late 60s. She was a meticulous geologist. He was a daredevil who dreamed of riding a lava flow on his own boat. They grew up in the same town, and as depicted by writer-director Sara Dosa, they were in a multi-decade menage-a-trois with the fiery, fracturing earth. “Once you see an eruption, you can’t live without it because it’s so grandiose, it’s so strong,” says Katia. And you believe her. 

The footage shot by the Kraffts is incredible. They have no reticence and little fear, often camping for weeks in active volcanos, so they are right up close to everything, two kindred souls in thrall. Their story is lovingly rendered by Dosa, who shows us a union fueled by adventure and enhanced in its last years by a commitment to governmental evacuation plans. 

I was reminded of Grizzly Man in terms of access to the dangers of nature. And indeed, the protagonists of both movies eventually press their luck and nature exacts its toll. But where Tim Treadwell’s immersion in the world of bears seemed fraught with an almost messianic hubris and his own narcissism, the Kraffts seem noble in their bravery and grounded in their devotion to the science. Beautiful and haunting.

On Hulu and Disney and nominated for an Oscar as Best Documentary.

She Said – 1 star

February 22, 2023
1 star, 2022, Crime/Mystery, Drama
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For a film about the investigative reporting of a very big story, this picture is about as interesting as assembly line work.

Some may say, “but Filmvetter, this is the reality of the job.” Alas, so is banging out fenders and they don’t make movies about that.

$34 million brought in $5 million domestic, justifiably so.  The film is a didactic, repetitive, undramatic, boring 2+ hours of drudgery acted by rote with a sprinkle of washed out dread.

I presumed the picture was a financial flop because of #MeToo fatigue, the lack of a present villain (in the movie, Harvey Weinstein is just a voice on boring phone calls and the back of a head – the most riveting part of the film by miles is the short clip of the actual vicious brute threatening a woman), a lack of stars, and the fact that a movie about reporters, especially in the digital age, would be static.  But its problems go deeper. This is less a picture than homework.  The great reportorial films (All The President’s Men, Spotlight) place their journalist protagonists in the areas of doubt, indecision and lack of assuredness. Even if they think they have the story cold, they are intrepid, skeptical, tough on each other. They make mistakes. They catch breaks.  They are drawn in.

Here, the reporters are emotionally invested in a matter that is a foregone conclusion from the outset. Beyond the sympathy they communicate is a barely contained outrage. Therapeutic enabling takes the place of inquiry, skepticism and the remove of professionalism. They just get a name, make a call or visit, sit down with an emotional, reluctant, and/or scared victim and report back to editors (Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher) who support them unreservedly, listening intently as the duo relay facts so elemental you weep for the descent of The New York Times. The newsroom is thus reduced to church and rally (“Let’s interrogate the whole system”).  Thank you, oh thank you, the reporters hug and cry when a source confirms. They do this three times.  

The two leads (Carrie Mulligan, Zoe Kazan) are as flat as both the material and the portentous strings and piano score. Kazan overlays her dullness with sophomoric earnestness. It also doesn’t help anyone that the film regularly proclaims it is about women at the expense of its female cardboard characters.

The picture is also brutally unsubtle. On numerous occasions, the film has a woman clunkily just pop in and do a solid for women writ large or a creepy man being an oaf or a pig. Discussions between Kazan and her young daughter on the nature of her work and “rape” are so forced and artificial as to be embarrassing. A character actually looks into the mirror to search his soul.

Finally, for what aspires to be a brave expose’, the movie pulls a few punches, ignoring or soft-pedaling some of the great institutional protectors of Weinstein (NBC, scores of Hollywood folk who knew for sure Weinstein was sexually abusive) while highlighting easier targets. Weinstein was Jeffrey Epstein and everyone wanted to be at his party, but we don’t get much on the partygoers.  

The film can be moving on occasion. A few of the interviews of Weinstein’s victims have the crackle of the scenes of abuse survivors in Spotlight. But the genuine moments are few and far between in this long, edifying slog, where post-partum depression is the most compelling aspect.

On Peacock.

Barbarian – 4 stars

February 1, 2023
2022, 4 stars, Scary
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Very clever and funny thriller/horror flick, currently on HBO Max. I’m reticent to say too much and spoil the fun, but can pass on the following–

1) This is a “horror” movie for folks who may not be predisposed to them. The gore is minimal, though the tension is high, and the levity is in abundance.

2) Everyone is good. Justin Long steals the show.

3) Perfect length at 1 hour, 42 minutes.

4) Detroit is a scary place.

5) A surprisingly sweet ending.

6) One reviewer wrote, “it’s ‘about’ stuff — gentrification, abuse, toxic masculinity, taking responsibility”, which, thankfully, is a ludicrous amplification of some elements, but it is a smart picture.  

7) It got knocked down to a 4 because of over-reliance on the charity and goodness of one character, a necessity to keep the freight train running, but lazy all the same.

Armageddon Time – 5 stars

January 19, 2023
2022, 5 stars, Drama
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The least sentimental coming of age film I’ve ever seen, James Gray’s (Ad Astra) autobiographical reflection of a middle-class Queens family at the advent of Reagan is evocative, unstinting and spare. Paul (Repeta Banks) is an artistic, unfocused, silly, and obnoxious sixth grader, doted on by his mother Esther (Anne Hathaway), cherished by his wise grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins) and in terror of his father Irving (Jeremy Strong), who can be silly too, but who also sports a volcanic temper.

Paul is a dreamer. He falls in with rebellious black kid Johnny (Jaylin Webb) at the public-school they attend and soon, he is in with this wrong crowd of one. Paul’s rebellion runs smack dab into the instincts and hopes of his extended family, which include elderly immigrant grandparents and an uncle and an aunt. 

This is a film about many things, but family is paramount.  When Irving beats Paul for getting in trouble at school, the scene is disturbing, but when Paul mutters, “I hate you… [I] hate this family…”, Irving returns and in Strong’s face, registers that there is no greater calumny (I thought for a split second an already brutal strapping was going to escalate). The family is the vehicle for all success and support.  They changed their distinct name of “Greizerstein” to “Graff,” and they want Paul out of public school, Esther being the last resistance. Per the aunt, “The class sizes are out of control, and the kids that they have coming in from the neighborhoods from all over.  The Blacks, coming in…” eliciting a gasp and rebuke from Esther.  These are, after all, traditional liberals (early on, Irving watches Reagan being interviewed, and comments “Sounds like a Class-A schmuck” and the film near-closes with the glum family watching Reagan’s victory and predicting nuclear war). But the facial response to Esther’s objection is a weary capitulation, an “it is what it is.”

They reminisce about their familial, generational struggles and focus on their shared goal of success. Sure, art is great, but an “artist”?

Paul’s behavior lands him in the private school attended by his older brother. The school’s most influential patron is none other than Fred Trump, and soon, Paul is in a new world.  When Johnny visits, he is on the other side of the playground fence, as we see Paul awkwardly shying away from his former partner in crime.

Went I went to private Catholic school in ’78, I came with a crew of over a dozen boys from grade school, every one of them white, into a feeder for Catholic parishes all over D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Until that time, the black kids I knew were the children of diplomats, literally and figuratively, from another country.  All of a sudden, there were a lot of black compatriots, kids probably just as scared as I was, but seemingly, not.  And in those years, there was casual racism where I (and many others, I am sure) was Paul, keeping my head low, negotiating the moment with assuredly too much regard for my own skin, smirking an endorsement or pretending I didn’t hear.  For every decent moment or objection, there were three of cowardice.

Gray does a wonderful job of depicting just how mundane and routinized these negotiations really are. As Irving tells Paul, “When you get older you can change the world.  Right now, you just need to get past this and become a mensch. Your friend got the shaft, you feel bad.  I understand that.” Modern dramatizations take such vignettes and make them seminal, even momentous. As Gray shows, they are more often than not pedestrian and disposable (“You just need to get past this”) or, in Gray’s most optimistic declaration, per Aaron:

GRANDPA AARON RABINOWITZ

It’s hard to fight.  Isn’t it.

PAUL GRAFF (beat)

I tried.

GRANDPA AARON RABINOWITZ

How do you think you did?

TEARS FORM in PAUL’S EYES.  He starts to shake his head.

GRANDPA AARON RABINOWITZ (CONT’D)

You’ll have a lot more chances.  And it will happen, again and again.  It won’t be easy.

It’s hard to overstate Gray’s deftness and restraint (another reviewer nailed it with, “At its most muted, it leaves a respectful distance for the audience to think”).  An example.  In the hands of a lesser writer, Paul’s matriculation at the Trump school would have been an ordeal through and through.  And it is not without its blots.  The casually racist kid, the strictures, the cliques.  But there is also attention to Paul, the kind that money brings, that every parent wants for their child, the kind where a troublesome kid isn’t immediately discarded as “slow” (the determination of Paul’s public-school principal). At public school, Paul’s “art” is doodling, dummy stuff. At his new private school, it is encouraged, even celebrated.  

And the Trumps, in the form of Fred (John Diehl) and Maryanne (cameo by Jessica Chastain), could have been lampooned.  In Gray’s hands, they are utilized. Both characters, in talks to the students, revere America in the vein of a zealot. As Fred Trump tells the kids, “Because we have a new president, a new beginning, a return to America’s rightful place in the world. I know speaking for myself personally I couldn’t have more hope than I do at this very moment in our future. So. When I look out, and I see all these beautiful, handsome kids, clean-cut… You’re ready to face the world–you’re being taught all the right things. And you’ll be the leaders. Leaders in business, finance, politics, all aiming to keep our country good and strong.”

Take the reference to “Class-A schmuck” Reagan out, and you can see Paul’s family nodding in reverential assent.

Similarly, Hopkins, as Paul’s soulmate, exhibits the lessons of his past, lovingly supporting Paul’s artistic ambitions while shocking Paul by admitting he was the key vote for the school change (“Because the game is rigged.  And we have to do everything we can for you and your brother”).

The rigging of the game and the fate of Johnny coalesce to end the picture, and like everything that came before, there’s no easy lesson or dawning.

The performances are pitch perfect. As Irving, Strong is noteworthy, a man who doesn’t really have control of his house or the respect he thinks he should be afforded, alternating between explosion and understanding.  The child actors are natural and Webb in particular evinces an affecting blend of the cynical, the world-weary, and the aspirational.

One of the best of the year.                              

The Northman – 2 stars

December 31, 2022
2022, Action/Disaster, Drama, Historical
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All the visual gifts in the world, and those of director Robert Eggars (The Witch) are prodigious, can’t make this Viking tale of filial vengeance any less stupid. There are a few joys - massive overacting (well played, Ethan Hawke, but Nicole Kidman wins by a nose), a few impressive scenes of sackings, the beautiful Northern Ireland topography standing in for Iceland - but boredom wins out, and by the end, it isn’t much of a fight. 

High and mindless, the picture could have used Game of Thrones’ intelligence or the John Boorman Excalibur’s fun. Instead, we get gory drug trips and silly moments when the film feels closer to RenFest than Valhalla. More hamburger than Hamlet. 

I do like how many of the actors try to do Norse and come off Transylvanian. 

The Banshees of Inisherin – 5 stars

December 14, 2022
2022, 5 stars, Comedy, Drama
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“Well, that was quite a thing” – my wife, at the end of the movie. Spoiler. Animals die.

About my wife. When that occurs, consider all your slack given.

It is indeed, however, quite a film, one that works as a fable, a meditation, and a beautiful, conflicted, messy tale of the shackles, joys and miseries of isolation, friendship and love.

I have a deep frustration with people who have the kind of depression that blots out the sun and cripples those who love them so much that they become collateral damage. The narcissism. The “I don’t take drugs because they change the essence of meeeeeeeeeeee!” The voracious appetite for the steadfastness of the simpletons who take the kicks and keep coming back for more. Blech. I’m not always proud of it but it is genuine and fixed in my marrow.

Here, a depressed, artistic man in despair (Brendan Gleeson) cuts off his simple, dull pal (Colin Farrell) even though they are lifelong friends on a barren Irish Island. The disassociation is brutal and final and nothing less than an assault from the intellectually superior and more sophisticated of the union. Every instinct I had was to decry Gleeson and champion Farrell, even as I grudgingly respected Gleeson’s stand, cruel and self-abasing as it was. I’m more gravitated to the simple and the banal, the loyal, Particularly when the artist’s excesses, in all their Van Gogh glory, start taking hostages. Taken at face value, it was no contest.

But as the picture progressed, my sympathies for both men equalized. Somewhat. Against all of my internal instincts. And in the struggle, the picture opens up and draws you into a much deeper analysis.

Fecking hell.

Interspersed in this tug-of-war is Martin McDonagh’s (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards) alternatively hilarious and mournful dialogue, deeply rooted in the Irish experience, with its strange and compelling fixation on conflict, routine, simplicity, and the Church.

A gem I wanted to hate.

On HBOMax.

All Quiet on the Western Front – 3.75 stars

November 14, 2022
2022, 3 stars, War
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Visually arresting, wonderfully acted, and almost unbearably bleak (as only a World War I trench drama can be), director Edward Berger has created the filmic equivalent of Erich Maria Lemarque’s language (“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces”). The miserable existence of the characters is interspersed with moments of such great humanity – the joy at the theft and cooking of a shared goose and the circulated kerchief of a French girl for sniffing come to mind – the pointlessness of it all is underscored.

But there are problems.

First, the dramatization of a last-ditch attack before the official armistice is over-the-top.  In the book, Paul, our protagonist, dies on a peaceful day, which is in many ways more poignant.  Here, he and his comrades are felled after a foolhardy and hubristic final charge ordered by a madman. The plot change feels insecure. Similarly, the injection of peace negotiations allows for some clunky foreshadowing along the lines of, “If you dictate such harsh terms, Pierre, there’s gonna’ be schnitzel to pay!”                 

Second, Saving Private Ryan has placed such a premium on verisimilitude in war pictures that they seem to one-up each other in conveying both the horror and the disorientation.  Which is normally to the good, save for an overuse of technical wizardry that can often border on the distracting (I am wondering if the drone is the new CGI).  At some point, you feel a little dirty for being exposed to so many new and awful ways to depict death.

On Netflix.