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Lone Survivor – Like An Inverse “300” | Movie Reviews

Read the Lone Survivor and other Movie Reviews at Manhattan Digest!

For a while, attempts by filmmakers to make movies set in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars were hindered by attempts to recreate the form and narrative of Vietnam movies, in style if not outright theme. Add the fact that audiences initially didn’t want to see in cinemas what they were getting from 24 hour news channels, early Afghan/Iraq war films were met with about as much success as John Wayne’s poorly received attempt to turn Vietnam into a World War II movie in The Green Berets. With a new arena came new rules, new soldiers, and new stories, and it wasn’t really until The Hurt Locker focused on the arena itself that the unique soldiers and stories began to engage audience and critic discussion. Now that the new rules were established and a little time for the public to come to grips with the wars, subsequent works such as the miniseries Generation Kill and Kathryn Bigelow’s follow up Zero Dark Thirty could follow actual soldiers and agents involved.

Peter Berg comes in to challenge Bigelow’s near monopoly on tales from the new arena with Lone Survivor, the true story of a failed mission against Taliban leader Ahmad Shahd by four members of Navy SEAL Team 10 in the mountains of Afghanistan. It is not Peter Berg’s first look into the area, as he previously directed The Kingdom, which flopped. Having since continued with the meager Hancock and notorious flop Battleship, he returns to the topic of the wars in the Middle East with a tighter budget and narrower focus, which ends up serving him well. So well, in fact, that Lone Survivor is turning out to be a surprise hit, having taken in nearly as much in its first weekend as The Kingdom did in its entire run, with almost half the budget.

The movie starts with a low resolution montage of Navy SEAL training rendered like an abject perversion of a military recruitment video, where minds and bodies are stretched and strained instructors and drill sergeants demands that the soldiers will themselves beyond their limits. The point of this introduction seems almost subverted by the glossier second beginning of the movie, a bookend element where Marcus Luttrell returns by helicopter broken and battered and near death. An elegiac voice over about camaraderie and brotherhood begins, and then the movie switches into a third beginning and the story actually starts.

Mark Wahlberg plays Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor and memoirist of the ill-fated Team 10 group. He’s accompanied by Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, and Ben Foster on a mission to kill Ahmad Shah, a Taliban combatant responsible for the deaths of dozens of American soldiers and the brutal execution of villagers he suspects of aiding Americans. Shah (Yousuf Asami) is laying low in a village in the mountains of Afghanistan, and it’s up to Team 10 to track him down.

First approach goes well, including visual identification of Shah. It’s everything else possible that goes wrong, in some mad mix of Murphy’s Law in the mountains. Rather than hiding with a few militants, Shah is discovered surrounded by some 200 armed men. Comms delay confirmation of their recon and eventually cut off altogether. And then a shepherding family accidentally steps across the team’s hiding place, and the entire mission is compromised.

This scene turns out to be one of the highlights of the movie. Luttrell and his men capture the family and debate whether they should compromise the mission and let them go, or kill them despite their innocence in order to keep everything under control. Their dilemma is inflated by a wary observation: if they kill the family, their faces will be plastered all over CNN as war criminals. If they let the family go, their decapitated heads will be all over Al Jazeera. This strange and semi-paranoid observation of media awareness in an otherwise clichéd morality tale. The soldiers can’t just act as warriors but also representatives.

They let the family go and know their fate is doomed. From there it only gets worse. The Taliban takes the offensive and the team goes on a desperate defensive retreat where every bit of damage they take decreases their chances of survival exponentially.

And they take a lot of damage.

Afghanistan is represented by the high desert and mountain ranges of New Mexico, using locations Berg initially seems to take unnecessarily lengthy interest in until the action explodes and it turns out the geography itself adds its own whips and cracks at the beleaguered combatants’ increasingly shredded bodies. The mountains come to be more than just a setting but an antagonist, throwing obstacles in the form of scraggly cliffs, sightline disrupting trees, and even some extra frag to aide the Taliban’s RPGs. Even the local flora and fauna seem to be against them.

Early establishing shots of high contrast and dried out rock faces are juxtaposed with quick shutter imposed jagged movement and harsh light to create a particularly biting quality to the violence. The confounding situations the soldiers seem to end up in are made even more chaotic by editing that jump cuts and even occasionally breaks the line of action (jumps to the other side of a soldier) over focus snaps and time-ramps. However, the qualities of these editing effects are held together by an impressionistic sound design.

The sound design, in fact, is one of Lone Survivor’s best aspects, recreating surges of adrenaline and moments of chaos, disorder, and confusion. Audio is helped along by an interesting score by Explosions in the Sky, a mostly fitting choice as the marching band tum-tutting quality of the drums works for the militaristic aspect while the reverbed trills and thrums of post-rock guitar bring in the anxiety.

For the most part the movie manages to make the combat so harsh that it doesn’t look entertaining or fun. Luttrell’s book, however, is a homage to the sacrifices of his brothers in combat under duress of an extreme and hard to imagine circumstance, and Berg pays tribute to it with the bookended plot voice over that seems to contrast mightily with his otherwise sharp-edged movie. Thus, at various points the movie suffers a creep of sentimentality, especially as Explosions in the Sky covers David Bowie’s “Heroes” as a dirge. However, the strange opening montage manages to tie the two seemingly conflictual representations together: Luttrell and his men managed to get as far as they did due to extraordinary levels of willfulness and physical strength.

It’s interesting to note that at various points the soldiers call each other Spartans. Lone Survivor is like an inverse 300, where a small group of raiders end up besieged in a foreign land in gritty realism and surprising humanism instead of defending their own land in a cartoonish CG fantasia.

Journeying Inside Llewyn Davis

by Dane Benko

The trailer for the new Coen brothers movie was a surprisingly dry tease. With stilted, almost Mumblecore dialog in desaturated imagery over Bob Dylan’s folk chords, the trailer sold the movie as any other 20-something inspired indie flick. To frustrate the viewer further, it cuts to black before the audience even hears Llewyn’s first acoustic strum. Upon unwrapping, however, Inside Llewyn Davis proves to be a box stuffed full of the Coen brothers’ best working habits, complete with amusingly dysfunctional failures of characters, dialog that variously nips and bites, and for what it’s worth, the best folk soundtrack for a movie seen since… well, the Coen brothers’ other folk-inspired Odyssey, O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Inside Dave Van Ronk album cover — Take note of this cover.

Oscar Isaac takes up the role of a couch-surfing New York folk singer in 1961, who is also a physical amalgamation of early Bob Dylan and his colleague Dave Van Ronk (the latter comparison is revealed explicitly by the cover of Llewyn’s new solo album Inside Llewyn Davis, which remakes the cover of real life album Inside by Dave Van Ronk). The movie begins in media res with an answer to the cutaway of the trailer, by settling right in to a concert at The Gaslight in Greenwich Village (again, Van Ronk’s old haunting grounds). After a pleasant introductory song you get used to the smoky enchantment of the place, rendered by new(ish) Coen brother collaborator Bruno Delbonnel (Roger Deakins was busy shooting Skyfall, so the brothers hired the director of photography from their Paris, je t’aime short). Once the piece is over, however, events quickly turn brutal, as Llewyn apologizes for hitherto unknown drunken actions of the night before to his barkeep friend, and then gets kicked and beaten outside the bar.

It turns out that the beginning is a bookend device and the background to these events are strung out from there. Llewyn Davis is feckless at best: sleeping in an unending circle of his friends’ couches, dropping his equipment off hither tither, and trying to run away from either some crushing responsibility or inner demons, it only becomes clear later which. He’s the existential and dramatic counterpoint to a slapstick hero, his thoughts always one step behind his own actions, resulting in a cascade of negative consequences.

Within the first couple of scenes he loses his upscale professor friend’s cat and is chewed out by Jean (Carey Mulligan), girlfriend of Jim (Justin Timberlake) for possibly getting her pregnant. Situations never really settle from there. As Llewyn Davis traverses the lonely New York City landscape, staving off fatigue and rolling over his debt against time into higher interest rates, we get further insight into the nature of his base circumstances. It turns out that he’s being left behind as Jean’s and Jim’s careers start to blossom, the folk scene starts to crystallize, and Llewyn has to make a decision between finding work and dedicating himself to his art. Thus the odyssey starts, as Llewyn seeks a way to get cash from his agent, the cat back to the Gorfeins, and the attention of record executive Bud Grossman, not to mention come to terms with his defiantly hidden feelings for Jean. This journey will bounce him up and down Manhattan’s west sides and between New York and Chicago, while running him into a variety of Coenish characters such as John Goodman’s appearance as a batty and overweight jazz musician.

As a central character, Llewyn can sometimes be difficult to stomach. With an abrasive personality, caustic attitude, and a constantly burning frustration, he’s every deadbeat mooch you’ve ever been friends with, except slightly more parasitic. Nevertheless the Coens actually manage to not only provoke sympathy, but actually all out empathy for his character. For all his screw-ups he doesn’t have much of a choice, and ultimately his inner motivations come down to things and people he’s lost well before the movie started. The trip he takes doesn’t operate quite like a Hero’s Journey, but rather is the medium through which we gain insight into his past. Thus the movie elegantly lives up to its name.

Whether audiences will muster it will be a different question. Inside Llewyn Davis is inverse O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Where the latter is colorful and fun the former is drab and so dry it crackles. Where the O Brother sold its soundtrack, the soundtrack sells Llewyn Davis. And rather than adapting The Odyssey with folk music, Llewyn Davis structures folk music history around an odyssey. The result is the exact type of movie that excites critics but depresses audiences.

Netflix’d: Thief Movie Reviews

by Peter Foy

I’m of the opinion that anything is worth doing if you accumulate knowledge. I am therefore of the opinion that if nothing else comes from my Netflix’d column (money, career prospects, writing experience, etc.) then it will have all been worth it just to have had a better grasp on this fact: Netflix takes down movies and shows eventually. I had originally intended to have this article be a review of the brilliant British sitcom Peep Show, but unfortunately it would appear that it has been removed from instant streaming. In that case, I will be doing another movie review for this week, so make sure you catch Thief before it goes the way of Peep Show.

Title: Thief
Director: Michael Mann
Writer: Michael Mann
Year: 1981
Running Time: 122 minutes
Starring: James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson
Genre: Crime Drama, Neo-Noir, Heist flick
Similar To: Rififi, The Long Good Friday, Heat

Film maker Michael Mann has been going through a bit of a rough phase as of late. His last two films (Miami Vice, Public Enemies) received negative reviews, and his HBO series Luck was cancelled after one season not for it’s low ratings, but because of PETA concerns surrounding the fact that three horses had been killed during the show’s production. From his recent work, it can be hard to recall that at one point the director was seen as a very consistent and appealing director. Known for his strong visuals and keen ear for selecting memorable soundtracks, Michael Mann has had a really interesting film career, especially when you consider he was the first director to bring Hannibal Lecter to the big screen (Manhunter), as well as have Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino share a scene (Heat). The 70-year old filmmaker is actually rather under-appreciated when one thinks about how often his name is brought up compared to peers like Martin Scorsese, and I actually feel his first film, 1981’s Thief, may actually stack up as his very best picture

The film is a Chicago-set crime drama that is indeed about a thief. This time it happens to be a guy named Frank (James Caan), who runs a bar and car dealership, but It’s all a front for his real career as a professional jewel thief, Lately though, he’s been wondering about giving the game up, and he wants to start a family with his girlfriend (Tuesday Weld), and is trying to get the right amount of money to support it. His exploits eventually bring him to Leo (Robert Prosky), a Chicago mob leader who is looking to pull off a very lucrative heist in Los Angelas, and he enlists Frank to help him.

Certainly not the most original plot in the world, but like several other great crime thrillers, Thief is all about the presentation and execution. Mann has nearly every shot of this film bursting in splendor, particularly in the action heavy scenes. One scene early on where Frank pulls a gun out in a office makes particular use of clever camera work, using plenty of close ups that give us a claustrophobic sense. Of course, the heist scenes are even more impressive, and they’re 100% believable in terms of the technology and methodology we see on screen, and are filmed in a really effective manner. Completely free of the trappings of CGI, Mann has his actors use real blowtorches and safe crackers in the film. Lengthy, carefully paced, and light on dialogue, the heist scenes in Thief recall the legendary robbery sequence in Jules Dassin’s noir classic Rififi, which is saying a lot for a mainstream Hollywood film that was released in the 80s.

Thief is certainly a grade-A technical merit on Mann’s part, but James Caan also makes this his film as well. One would of thought that James Caan’s career would have really taking off after the Godfather, but he actually has been involved in plenty of lousy pictures throughout his decade spanning career. His performance in Thief remains a highlight for him, as he makes Frank quite an affable anti-hero. He’s a rugged and take-no-shit kind of guy, but there’s a real longing in him to go on to a life that actually means something. Some of the best scenes in the film involve Frank’s time with his love interest, such as scene when he’s yelling at her about how obvious it is that he’s a thief, while also asking her for sympathy. It’s probably the single funniest and sweetest scene that Mann has ever directed.

Flaws are few and far between, but there are some notables. A few of the scenes that take place in LA look absolutely nothing like the city (they weren’t shot there), and there could of been more storyline involving the film’s corrupt cop characters (especially considering how good an actor Dennis Farina is). As I said before the story is familiar too, but Mann finds ways to capitalize on the film’s necessary cliches. It’s all tightly wound, and ideally sets up the film’s heightened intensity and grit in the final act.

Thief is a must see film for crime fans, and arguably one of the best American pictures of the 1980s. Michael Mann really was at the top of his game here, as the film’s simplicity in plot allowed him to concentrate on conjuring some really complex visual cues. While it’s understandable when people say that all great directors burn out eventually, watching Thief gives me confidence that Mann still has that sort of mentality inside him. Even though this film came out over 30 years ago, I really do feel Mann has it in him to make another great film like Thief.

Netflix’d: Naked

by Peter Foy

Hope you guys have been keeping warm this past week, as that damn groundhog appears to have been way off this year. Regardless, it’s the perfect time to catch up on some great cinema that’s available right through your Netflix account. Today I’ll be looking at Naked, a challenging British art-film from the 90s that’s even more chilly than New York’s February climate. I’ll try and keep this review extra warm though.

Title: Naked
Director: Mike Leigh
Writer: Mike Leigh
Year: 1993
Running Time: 131 minutes
Starring: David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge
Genre: Drama, Art-house, experimental film (horror?)
Similar To: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; Happiness; The Master

As I get older, the more I realize that I no longer want clear-cut answers from films. I no longer want to be spoon-fed stories about absolute good vs. absolute evil, as I just don’t see that as pertaining to real life anymore. I want morally ambigous character, and a world view that sees life as being grey, rather than black or white. Also, I want open-ended stories that don’t overfeed us with too much information. I want film’s that I can mold into my own entity. With that said, it’s easy to see why I feel Mike Leigh’s 1993 film Naked is one of the richest films I’ve come across in terms of moral density, as well as an uncomfortable piece of art.

It’s a bit of a challenge for me to describe the film in a synopsis, as the film is skeletal in terms of having a traditional plot. Right from the start, this is a film that shows that it’s not throwing any punches, as we witness the film’s main character Johnny (David Thewlis) rape a woman and then steal a car. He rides to the Dalston neighborhood of London (which he describes as unpretentious) where he hooks up with his old girlfriend Mancunian (Lesley Sharp), and from there any idiom of a plot pretty much disintegrates. For the next two hours we see this character wander around the disheveled neighborhood interacting with people and usually subjecting them to his domineering claims. Manic, sexually hungry, self-destructive and clearly intelligent, Johnny is a strange beast to watch no doubt, and perhaps a figurehead of sorts too.

Why is this film so starkly dark? Well, the simple answer is that the truth isn’t always pretty. Naked is a very direct social commentary, and like Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover it’s a scathing critique on Thatcherism. Unlike that earlier film, however, Mike Leigh has more of an interest in “kitchen-sink: realism, and mostly avoids allegories in relating tales of those that became downtrodden under the wrath of the Iron Lady. It becomes readily apparent that Johnny is a victim of circumstances, as his sloppy way of walking and musings with intellectualism hint that he likely has a social disorder. He’s a rather ugly looking man for sure, but the world around him isn’t any less wretched. Filmed in a grey-palette and occasionally using wobbly camera techniques, Naked is one of the few films to really understand the sickly and disorienting nature of urban life, but is it a reflection of Johnny’s frame of mind or vice-versa?

Naked proved to be quite a success for Mike Leigh as it won him the best director awards at Cannes, and has continued to be seen as a highlight in his filmography. Today though, it’s easy to forget that the film was quite a departure for British director Mike Leigh at the time of it’s release. While the filmmaker had been known for making film’s that were both political and modest, there were overt comedic elements to films like Life is Sweet and High Hopes that seem to have all been wiped out for this one. Still, Leigh’s experience with comedy actually does contribute to the film’s craft, as Naked actually does have a lot of improv in it. David Thewlis made up much of his character’s dialogue while doing rehearsals, and they were incorporated into the final script. It resulted in giving the film a very organic feel in terms of character interaction, and the scenes involving Johnny discussing his world views are fascinating. Johnny does show a human side to him as the film goes on, and it’s hard not to admire his philosophies, even if they can come off as naive. Even those that have no interest on England’s Thatcher years should be able to unearth some telling information about the paranoia and fear that social outsiders hold in contemporary society. It wouldn’t be right to call Naked a dark comedy, but it’s not without it’s moments of levity.

Naked is certainly aptly titled, as it’s the justification for the brutality we see on screen. Stripped of morals, honor, class and hope, we witness these characters at their most bare, yet also question how far away our own lifestyles might be from there’s. It’s as harsh and unpleasant a film as it ever was, even twenty years later when graphic content has become more common in mainstream films. Still it’s undeniably potent, and a film that all appreciators of arthouse cinema should see. After viewing this, however, you might need to settle down with something a lot lighter. Fortunately, Mike Leigh’s more recent film Happy-Go-Lucky, a complete 180 from Naked, is a joy to watch and also readily available for streaming on Netflix.

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