When the Levees Broke, Bitter Victory, & House of Bamboo

When the Levees Broke is powerful must-see filmmaking. There is nothing more that needs to be said. If it doesn't piss you off immensely, your last name is either Bush or Cheney.

Bitter Victory has Christopher Lee in it. Huh. But it's also the film that caused Godard to say, "henceforth there is cinema, and the cinema is Nicholas Ray." Does it live up to that? Of course not. Hyperbole of that sort pisses me off. Godard is a completely silly man. Is it a good war film? Yes. Richard Burton and Curd Jürgens having a constant argument ostensibly about anything other than that they both love the same woman, and that they want to kill each other but can't for various reasons. All set in the North African desert. You have the idealistic former archaeologist and the career army man. The deeper meanings of the conflict are pretty clearly similar to Rebel without a Cause and other angry youth films of the period.

House of Bamboo is why I watched The Street with No Name. Because it's a Samuel Fuller remake of that film set in Japan, and was the first Hollywood film made there. Those two reasons were more than enough. Too bad the original was so eh. At least they didn't bother to have any whites playing Japanese. Man, that pisses me off to no end. Fuller and the cinematography are excellent. It's a shame that the movie itself is so damn weak. It's the whole documentary touches that just take you out of the film that make it worse. Still suffers from "White-guy-yells-to-make-himself-understood-in-foreign-country" that just is annoying. The movie just doesn't work, but to the extent it does, it has nothing to do with the script. Also, eyebrows are attractive to Japanese women? Interesting...