Documentary Review Fallen

Fallen (2017) 

Directed by Thomas Marchese 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Michael Chiklis 

Release Date September 1st, 2017

Published August 29th, 2017 

How do I write fairly about a documentary about police officers? It’s harder than it seems. Police officers have become polarizing figures in our culture and writing about them inevitably leads to arguments on all sides. If I don’t write critically of police officers I will be accused of ignoring the terrible traumas that police officers have inflicted upon the innocent and guilty alike. If I write negatively of police officers I am accused of not understanding the difficulty of their job and having some leftist political agenda.

So, how do I write about the new documentary Fallen and serve both the masters of being truthful and being respectful. Just by saying there are two sides to this I’m already in trouble with one side or the other so maybe whatever I write here doesn’t matter. Those of you who believe the police are corrupt bullies and those of you who believe police are being persecuted likely stopped reading this to argue after the first paragraph.

That’s a shame because the new documentary Fallen is one of those that deserves to be seen by anyone with a beating heart and not just those for whom it fulfills a side of an argument. Narrated by Michael Chiklis, Fallen takes us to the homes and families of police officers who were killed in the line of duty. The documentary aims to humanize the loss of a life, not just the death of a police officer, and it is a powerful and moving message about grief and loss.

Directed by former LAPD officer Thomas Marchese, Fallen tells five specific stories, including Thomas’s own brush with death which enters the narrative just as the film is being made. Fallen contains some very disturbing footage of actual encounters where police officers are shot or otherwise assaulted and had their lives threatened or taken. The footage is shocking for its visceral, Faces of Death level violence and its complete, uncompromising reality.

The shock footage thankfully is only a portion of Fallen, though a necessary one. The bulk of the film takes us to the hometowns of officers who’ve been killed to talk about the human and specific impact of these people’s deaths, from a pair of police officers murdered in a coffee shop while doing paperwork to the stunning story of a motorcycle cop who simply stopped to aid what he thought was a broken down motorist and wound up being shot and killed.

Read my full length review at Serve.Media 

Classic Movie Review Hamburger Hill

Hamburger Hill (1987) 

Directed by John Irvin 

Written by James Carabatsos

Starring Michael Boatman, Don Cheadle, Dylan McDermott, Courtney B. Vance 

Release Date August 28th, 1987 

Published August 29th 2017 

There are those who claim that Hamburger Hill is the least remembered of 80s Vietnam movies, a niche genre all its own in that decade, because it was a right wing, reactionary movie intended to defend soldiers. Time has a way of changing perceptions and now that Hamburger Hill is turning 30 years old, it’s interesting to look back on the film and talk about the perceptions of the film and how they’ve evolved over the years and the ways in which guilt, shame and history have altered the way many view Vietnam.

Hamburger Hill tells the story of one company in the midst of a battalion ordered to take a single hill from the North Vietnamese. The hill would come to be called Hamburger Hill because meat may be all that’s left of a soldier after he gets blown away while climbing this ungodly, muddy, and eventually blood-soaked hill. It’s grisly and part of the film’s reputation comes from what the title implies, a gruesomeness that put audiences off just from the title.

The film is gruesome as director John Irvin doesn’t hold back on the blood and guts but where the film’s reputation is somewhat misguided is the notion that that is all Hamburger Hill was, just blood and guts. The film actually takes time to build toward the blood guts. Hamburger Hill has a slow build where you take the time to get used to the young faces and personalities preparing to die on the hill. It’s not until the film’s remarkable third act that the gruesomeness moves to the foreground.

Until the third act the film is relatively tame in terms of violence. Instead we get a warts and all look at these soldiers whom we watch become more and more detached from life back at home and unmoored from the reality around them because death seems so close. The film shines a harsh light on the reality of Vietnam, the way the soldiers were mistreated to the point where us against the world was the only mentality that made any sense.

While people back home accused these soldiers of being bloodthirsty killers, the reality was so much more complicated than that. These were men who were abandoned in Vietnam. Whereas people like Patton, McArthur, and Eisenhower had the weight and experience to give soldiers courage and purpose, the soldiers of Vietnam are rudderless, tools of the government abandoned by a society crumbling from the optimism of the 50s into the greed infested era to come where the divide between rich and poor was often defined by those who went to Vietnam and those rich enough not to have to.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Tulip Fever

Tulip Fever (2017) 

Directed by Justin Chadwick 

Written by Deborah Moggach, Tom Stoppard

Starring Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Jack O'Connell, Tom Hollander, Christoph Waltz 

Release Date September 1st, 2017 

Published August 31st, 2017

Tulip Fever tells the story of an orphan girl named Sophia who is plucked from a Dutch orphanage to become the wife/concubine of a rich trader named Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz). Sophia’s life is a relatively dull routine but nothing she really notices as, aside from the orphanage, it’s all she’s ever known. Sophia’s worldview changes when the outside world comes crashing into her secluded domesticity in the form of a lusty painter named Jan Van Loos (Dane Dehaan) who awakens the kind of desire within Sophia that her arranged marriage could never possibly create.

Not a bad story? So why is Tulip Fever such silly nonsense? It’s illogical. Director Justin Chadwick covered similar period drama lustiness in The Other Boleyn Girl to fine effect and Tom Stoppard won an Academy Award for writing Shakespeare in Love and also wrote Brazil and Empire of the Sun. Add to this the rising star Alicia Vikander, two time Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz and the ingredients are here for an incredible film. Tulip Fever even has Academy Award winner Judi Dench and it’s still a miserable sit.

The simple fact is that the simple plot I described has been done to death. Stoppard’s own Shakespeare in Love is little more than a less haughty and more prestigious version of this same story. To attempt to escape the notion that the film is a poor copy of previous period movies, Tulip Fever adds two more characters and convoluted plot about faked pregnancy and a faked death and while the plot wheels spin in desperate effort to avoid repeating period cliché we in the audience grow ever more weary of the whirring, blurring silliness of the plot.

Jack O’Connell and Holliday Grainger play Willem and Maria. Maria is Sophia’s servant and Willem is the local fish-monger. They’ve fallen madly and love and Willem has a plan for them to escape servitude. Willem is entering the high stakes trade of Tulips which have become the hottest commodity in all of Denmark at this time. When Willem comes into luck, growing a rare Tulip that could get he and Maria out of their poverty only the lame contrivance of the plot can intervene and boy does it.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media