MovieMonday: Creed II

This second Creed movie is well made, well acted and enjoyable to watch.  It also is a classic sequel in that it takes a popular original and then piles on More.

The original in this case is 2015's Creed, a film I admired.  "Creed" revived the Rocky franchise and gave it a fresh start.

The "Creed II" setup is this:  Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) has trained with Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) and put together a good boxing career.  He wins the world heavyweight championship and proposes to his girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson).

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, an old Rocky foe, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lungren), seethes.  The Russian fighter killed Adonis' father in a boxing match but then lost everything in Rocky IV and wants his son, Viktor (Florian Munteanu), to reclaim the family honor by defeating Adonis Creed.

Adonis wants to fight to avenge his father's death.  His adoptive mother, Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) opposes the idea.  Rocky refuses to participate.  Both believe he wants to fight for the wrong reason.  Adonis fights anyway.  It does not go well.

Then Team Adonis reforms with a new sense of purpose and prepares for a final act, which, like the final act in "Rocky IV" is set in Moscow.

In addition to more old Rocky history, this movie has many more family themes.  Adonis and his father, Adonis and his mother, Adonis and Bianca, Adonis and Bianca and their baby, Adonis and Rocky, Rocky missing his late wife, Rocky missing the son he no longer sees, Ivan and Viktor, both Dragos missing the wife and mother who abandoned them.

Again, the film works fine. Its theme -- a gutty boxer with something to prove and people who matter to him -- may draw new, younger fans to the loyal Rocky audiences who have been arguing for years about which is the best movie from that first six-film cycle.

But this movie, while good, is not great.  The story is effective but offers nothing new, as the original "Creed" did.

The question is whether there is a perpetual audience for more movies with the same plot, with or without Michael B. Jordan and/or Sylvester Stallone

World War I: Guns, Gas, Poetry and Painting

November 11, 2018

Wilfred Owen

One century ago today, World War I ended.  Germany had been defeated and signed a surrender.  All combatants agreed that the Armistice would commence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.  

I'm not sure the 11-11-11 symbolism was helpful.  Once an agreement had been reached, why not lay down arms immediately?  There were telegraph wires to send messages rapidly by then, and at least a few more soldiers and civilians might have survived if the order had gone out immediately.  As it was, 17 million persons, military and civilian, already had died.

Meanwhile, in England, church bells were ringing to celebrate the end of fighting when a telegram was delivered to the Shrewsbury home of Thomas and Susan Owen.  Its message was that their son, Wilfred, had been killed in France just one week earlier, cut down by machine gun fire as he led troops across a canal in Ors.  He was just 25.

Like the telegraph, the machine gun was a newish innovation.  More than 50 years earlier, during the American Civil War, the first multiple-shot weapon, the Gatling gun, was introduced by the North.  By World War I, Germany had refined the idea and in 1917 introduced a machine gun that could spit out 600 bullets a minute.  One of those bullets killed Wilfred Owen.

Another innovation of the war was the armored tank, deployed first by the British in the Battle of Somme in 1916 and soon afterward by the German army.  In 1915, the Germans began lobbing chlorine gas during battles; the English responded with gas attacks of their own.  The most deadly gas, mustard gas, was introduced by German forces in 1917; it too was taken up by the English.    

Owen, a tutor and teacher, had been fighting in the British army since 1915.  After more than two years at the front, he was sent back to England to be treated for for "shell shock," which we now would call PTSD.  During that period he wrote war poems that reflected his disillusionment and anger.  He left these behind when he returned to the battlefield in July 1918.  They were published in book form in 1920.

Owen had read his classics:  Homer's "Iliad," the history/poem about theTrojan War and Horace's odes about the internal battles between the assassination of Julius Caesar and the transformation of the Roman republic into the Roman Empire.  

The Romans built their influence with wars of conquest, and Horace was a sort of court poet who was expected to glorify heroism and even death in battle.  

World War I wasn't that kind of war, however, and Wilfred Owen's most famous poem laid out the differences.   

One Horatian line that Owen borrowed was this:  "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,"  which translates as "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country."  Owen had seen too much.  He called that notion "The old Lie."

Here is the poem itself.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; 

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.- 

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- 

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. 

This poem is strong for its complex structure, for its imagery and for its unflinching description of a soldier's death throes following a mustard gas attack.  

Another artist, painter John Singer Sargent, visited a World War I battlefield and observed soldiers who had been blinded by mustard gas at a treatment station.  From this experience, he made this painting, "Gassed," which was completed in March 1919.
  

The painting is huge, more than 20 feet long, which suggests how strongly Sargent took its subject.  Later, when he was commissioned to do group portraits of British commanders and and statesmen, those paintings were smaller.

So that was the war:  A triumph of military innovations and the death of millions, remembered in art but without a meaning understandable to the men who fought or to their loved ones.

World War I was known for several decades as the War to End all Wars and the Great War.  Then, in 1939, came World War II, which was distinguished by more deaths, deadlier weapons and not so much art.

Hiatus

An unexpected turn of events has landed the Idiosyncratist on the injured reserve list for a week or so.

When the Id returns, there will be a rumination on the centennial of the World War I armistice and a delayed Movie Monday post.

MovieMonday: Bohemian Rhapsody

This is a perfectly enjoyable movie about Queen, the stadium/anthem band of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it pulls a bunch of punches on its way to wrapping the story into a neat, coherent package.

If you want to know how the script rearranges timelines, adds fake conflicts and ignores unappealing facts to stitch together a not particularly truthy biopic, this Rolling Stone story has the details.

That said, there is much to like, most notably Rami Malek's portrayal of Freddie Mercury, Queen's charismatic and complex lead singer.  We meet him as Farrokh Bulsara, a Parsi baggage handler at Heathrow Airport who talks his way into fronting a band he admires.  Minutes later, he has changed the band's name and his own, and the group are writing and performing many still-familiar rock classics.  

Gwilym Lee also does a nice job as Brian May, the band's cool and very capable lead guitarist; his steadiness contrasts with Mercury's moods and sinuous stage antics.  (The real Brian May is reported to have shaped much of the movie's plot, which soft-pedals Mercury's gayness and drug use, which were central to his public and private identities.  Mercury died of AIDs in 1991.) 

There are nice scenes of Queen composing songs, and also many fragments of performances.  These will appeal to Queen fans who grew up with the music and now are middle-aged, the audience demographic in the screening I saw.  Their enthusiasm, stoked by a monthslong promotion campaign, gave the film a remarkable $50 million opening weekend in the U.S.  

Here are the songs most prominent in the movie:  “Another One Bites the Dust,” “We Are the Champions,” "We Will Rock You," "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and, of course, "Bohemian Rhapsody." If you have fond memories of these, by all means go.


Context

Queen's performing career ended in 1986.  The movie's opening and final scenes focus on the enormous 1985 LiveAid concert in London's Wembley Stadium.  

The band's cultivation of crowd involvement -- clapping, stamping, singing along, echoing Mercury's phrases, etc. -- prefigure the current situation, in which musicians make most of their money from performances and not from sales of recordings.

Last summer, Kenny Chesney attracted an audience of almost 59,000 to Met Life Stadium, the New Jersey home of football's Jets and Giants.  Over the course of the six-show stand, total attendance approached 390,000 in a region not typically associated with country music.  It's clear that being part of large concert events is central to the appeal.