Movie Summary: "In 1942, an intelligence officer in North Africa encounters a female French Resistance fighter on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. When they reunite in London, their relationship is tested by the pressures of war."Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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| Hi everybody, it's Savan Mullen from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| So I went to go and see the new Brad Pitt movie, Allied, and it was quite an experience, as I shall share with you hencewith. | |
| In the movie Allied, the camera is almost always in motion. | |
| The scenery is equally fluid, flowing down the screen like the slow gravity of rain on a fresh watercolor painting. | |
| The wind howls, the bombs fall, tracer bullets light up the sky like a child's neon drawing of rising artillery vengeance. | |
| Everything moves, everything lives and dies and laughs and cries with one notable and rather glaring exception. | |
| Brad Pitt's face. | |
| I know, he is supposed to be impressive and manly, but seriously, this movie feels like his two-hour audition for the newest addition to Mount Rushmore. | |
| I know, I know, there's such a thing as understated acting, but that does require, I don't know, Some change in emotional direction from time to time. | |
| I mean, compared to Marion Cotegard's hyper-Francais, distracting Indian marriage-mold, neoteny-animated, giant, gallic, lizard-eyed face, the average building in the movie has far more animation than Brad Pitt's narcoleptic acting. | |
| At least the buildings move when bombed. | |
| Brad Pitt's emotional demeanor remains the same as he prepares for battle, engages in battle, flees from battle, sleeps, wakes, screws, dresses, undresses. | |
| Well, you get the picture. | |
| And his facial expressions are indeed a picture. | |
| They do not move. | |
| That's what I'm saying. | |
| Now I, as a person, have the kind of facial animation one would expect from your average hyperkinetic coked-up cartoon character, so I might be coming at this from a slightly over-motioned direction, but really, if a storyline is going to orbit a central character like planets orbit a sun, can we get a little light and heat, some contrast, some energy, for God's sakes? | |
| Of course, the real star in Allied is not Brad Pitt exactly, but Brad Pitt's hair. | |
| I can imagine that hairstylists in the movie all gathered together in a circle, held hands, and prayed for the strength, for their skill to match the supple flexibility, endless shapeability, and most strange in wartime, gelability of Brad Pitt's frozen golden water mane. | |
| I also get the feeling that the director, after asking for weeks for Brad Pitt to change his facial expression, just kind of gave up and barked orders to the wardrobe and hairstyle folks. | |
| Well, he needs to be serious in this scene, so, I don't know, put him in a uniform. | |
| Ooh, he needs to be more relaxed in this scene, so put him in a cardigan. | |
| Oh dear, he's supposed to be upset in this scene, so stylishly mess up his hair a little, will you? | |
| It's like Brad forgot. | |
| He played the lead in World War Z and is auditioning, now to be one of the brain-eaten extras. | |
| Now, I know, I'm fully aware, I understand that Brad Pitt's general persona is supposed to project this distant, manly, sociopathic, arctic chill calm, but here's the problem with that. | |
| Sociopaths are really, really boring. | |
| The way, Brad, even sociopaths pretend to feel from time to time, and often quite convincingly, too. | |
| See, it's really tough to care about someone who has no emotions. | |
| I cared somewhat about blank-slate Marion Cotirard's pseudo-character, although, in hindsight, I might have just been feeling sympathy for her raise-the-dead acting challenges she faced. | |
| Watching her trying to emotionally connect with heroically uninvolved Brad Pitt was like watching someone try to ice fish using a giant rubber oar. | |
| There may be fish down there somewhere, honey, but you're never going to get at them that way. | |
| Might I suggest a depth charge or even two? | |
| Now, as I talked about in a previous video, there were rumors that an affair with his co-star was one of these straws. | |
| See, I worked camels in just like Casablanca. | |
| But it's hard to detect signs of such an affair just by watching the movie. | |
| See, there's this old cliché among directors that if your stars are sleeping with each other for real, like all the heat dissipates in the real bedroom and there's really nothing left for the camera... | |
| Watching Marion Cotillard trying to have sex with Brad Pitt is like watching an over-emotional poodle attempting to mount a beige fire hydrant. | |
| If you find it arousing, there is something deeply wrong with you. | |
| At one point, they have sex in a car. | |
| During a sandstorm, it does not speak well to the chemistry of the couple that I, for one, found the patterns of the sand on the window more interesting. | |
| And at one point I wondered exactly how much sand might blow in through the car vents and up into their nether regions, and whether that would cause them to make crunchy sounds when they walked or chewed or brushed their teeth, and whether this would make it harder for them to be spies and so on. | |
| Picture the course checklist of your average feminist complaining about the lack of women in STEM fields. | |
| No chemistry. | |
| That's kind of what I'm saying. | |
| I will say this, though. | |
| The visuals in Ally do have a lazily spectacular quality to them. | |
| The director, of course, puts them in the background, overhead in passing, which brings a reality and vividness in particular to the London Blitz scenes. | |
| My relatives actually lived through that, and I literally felt a very emotional hole in time open up in my heart between the now and the then. | |
| This is what they saw. | |
| This is what they heard. | |
| This is what they felt. | |
| It was genuinely powerful, and I have no idea whatsoever how they managed to vividly and viscerally so much recreate wartime London. | |
| The Lancaster bombers that I obsessively built as a child were spread across a green and pleasant airfield in casual rows of poised destruction. | |
| There can't be that many left after so many years. | |
| I actually also had the same feeling watching the war go up in post-war Berlin in the Spielberg film A Bridge of Spies. | |
| It's not so much art anymore as time travel, to me at least. | |
| However, the stunning visuals in the movie do serve to raise the game required for the actors. | |
| You are competing with a background that draws everyone's attention away, like a question from a conservative in a sea of rainbow hair lefty arts course. | |
| In the Casablanca scenes, I found myself... | |
| Quite distracted by the empty mime and gesticulate extras. | |
| I did that job for money in my youth at times. | |
| And I wondered whether they were local actors or elderly retired people regretting their bland lives and wanting to show up on camera to LARP immortality. | |
| And how excited the man and woman must have been to know that they would be right behind Brad Pitt's hair and Marion Cotillard's dewy eyes in the scene and so on. | |
| Now, this is, I think, the first time I have seen Marion Cotillard in a movie, and my heart kind of went out to her. | |
| She does not have an easy job. | |
| Her character is a cipher, I assume intentionally so, but she does struggle heroically to bring it to life, and her trembling cheeks and vampire lips and gaping, frightened, baby, lizard-rimmed, onion eyes... | |
| Worked their magic, but it feels or felt kind of strained. | |
| Watching her try to animate this empty character is like watching a failed Frankenstein experiment because there isn't enough lightning in a storm on Jupiter to bring those dead letters to life. | |
| Brad Pitt's character died on the page before the movie was even made, just as hers did, but she flails at it like a desperate surgeon unable to pronounce time of death. | |
| Also, damn you, Harold Pinter. | |
| See, when I was in theater school, Harold Pinter was all the rage. | |
| The Pinter pause was where all the real acting was supposed to be. | |
| Basically, you were a psychopathic mime who was forced to speak from time to time because without words, you can't get the pauses, which is where the real acting is, of course. | |
| This led to a hatred of speeches that has infected movies and plays for decades now. | |
| The goal is to compress complexity into emptily uttered, minimalistic syllables, perhaps to make the movie easier to subtitle for foreign audiences. | |
| I don't know. | |
| The need for worldwide audiences has certainly emptied movies of meaning for at least a generation because nothing can offend anyone and originality and honesty is always offensive because people and cultures generally live on such lies. | |
| So there are no speeches in the movie, and thus no relief from the current alienation of the characters, no window into any hidden parts of their personalities. | |
| So I end up with the frustration of an engineer seeing a diabolically complex gadget for the first time, but forbidden to open it. | |
| I want to see the inside out! | |
| I want to see the inside! | |
| There is no inside in this movie, and thus the people are only props for the CGI. Here's the thing. | |
| At least for me, maybe for you as well. | |
| I care about people who have families, friendships, communities, complexities, not just jobs and gel and smart outfits and itchy trigger fingers. | |
| Other than Brad Pitt's throwaway pseudo-lesbian sister, no family members of any kind show up in Allied, and thus the movie has all the emotional depth of two hyper-medicated psychotics having a silent Christmas dinner under cold fluorescent lights. | |
| Marion Cotillat's character has no parents, no friends, no relatives. | |
| She is the uncomplicated bachelor fantasy of who you might end up marrying. | |
| Thus, Marianne Cotillard's character denies the reality that when you commit to a woman, when you get married, you get a whole extended family. | |
| And so does she, most times. | |
| We so often forget to choose our lovers with the full recognition that she comes as a package deal with her entire gene pool, who will often want to borrow money and end up scratching your car and covering it up. | |
| Also, her mother is a terrible cook, but no one has had the courage to tell her since she first short-circuited her Easy-Bake oven and almost choked the cat with her half-warm chemical goo. | |
| But, perhaps I digress. | |
| We care about characters, like in movies, stories, plays. | |
| We care about characters by watching them care about others, by identifying with the complexities of their n-dimensional relationships. | |
| Two people without external relationships live in the fusion-based, codependent phase of early let's-make-a-sheet-tent-and-bang-all-weekend, well, relationships, let's say. | |
| If you've ever had a friend who vanishes up a new vagina until you have to send spelunking parties in with wasabi condoms and reminders of past friendships, you know how annoying that phase is. | |
| Hey, thanks for the 20-year friendship, but I'm going to vanish into the thump and nap cave until I'm too sore to stand and pee. | |
| Then I might give you a call, which will make you uneasy because you suspect I'm actually getting blown on the phone. | |
| Well... | |
| Imagine that for two hours. | |
| I would, to be frank, also love to see some at least lazy movement in the direction of reducing movie clichés. | |
| Smart people hate repetition, but I guess less intelligent people seem to love it because these clichés always seem to return, like a broken record script written by a stuttering Marco Rubio. | |
| And don't give me any of that Joseph Campbell, hero of a thousand faces crap. | |
| It's not an archetype. | |
| It's just a cliché. | |
| Allied moviemakers, I charge you with the following crimes against originality. | |
| Exhibit A. The grizzled old veteran trying to inject stone-faced courage into a pale-faced, curly-haired, soon-to-die young soldier. | |
| Exhibit B. The soldier who directly disobeys orders but is not arrested. | |
| Exhibit C. The impossibly beautiful female spy. | |
| Yes, because spies are always chosen because they stand out blindingly in a crowd. | |
| It's so easy to hide by being totally, totally memorable. | |
| Exhibit D. The hearty, energetic, emotionally vacuous British soldier. | |
| Bitey, bitey! | |
| What, what? | |
| Exhibit E. The superficially friendly yet subterraneously dangerous pseudo-Tarantino Nazi with his feral smile, yellow teeth, bad hair, and sudden dangerous tricks. | |
| Exhibit F. Endless waves of anonymous enemy soldiers who hear gunshots and just come pouring in through the doorway to get shot. | |
| I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea. | |
| Now... | |
| I was actually very moved at the end of the film. | |
| I have an exceedingly squishy soft spot in my soul for tender and self-sacrificing mothers because, well, let's just say I did not have much experience of one up close and personal. | |
| And the ending of the movie, while not exactly catching me by surprise, certainly caught me by the heart. | |
| And like all secret sobbers, I was a little embarrassed when the theater lights came up to reveal me wailing like a toddler shocked by his first hit in the face with an icy snowball. | |
| There are such primal agonies in wartime, so many impossible choices, so much dissociated courage, so much kindness in brutality and brutality in kindness, Europe, that it sort of pulls me apart at the base of my spine. | |
| Also, dear Lord, can we give enemy soldiers just a little bit of AI, please? | |
| Even the pseudo-demons in the old video game Unreal did dive rolls from time to time. | |
| Trained soldiers who, I don't know, don't want to die, don't charge into rooms. | |
| They are cautious. | |
| They assess the situation. | |
| They call for backup. | |
| They are infantry, not Japanese kamikaze pilots. | |
| As a filmmaker, you might be able to get away with this nonsense Black Hawk Down style portraying American soldiers fighting off average IQ 68 Somalis, but Germans are very intelligent, and it diminishes the enemy when you portray him as a black-helmeted lemming rushing at Brad Pitt looking for death by chiseled jawline. | |
| Frankly, it doesn't look very heroic to gun down a mentally challenged suicide squad. | |
| I am concerned about how war is portrayed in this movie, because war is likely coming again. | |
| And it really feels that we're being trained to worship it and to ignore the actual odds, which are generally 50-50 in any encounter with an enemy. | |
| Lying to the young about their odds of survival and victory in war breeds the kind of enthusiasm that led to the deaths of millions in the First World War trenches. | |
| Everyone thought they would be on a horse with a gun leading a charge, but what really happened was some bastard 20 miles away pushed a button and you vaporized into a bloody mist that, if you were lucky, might blow towards your actual homeland. |