Posted on 12/26/2008 4:27:13 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
Say what you will about Tom Cruise’s acting in other movies; in "Valkyrie," which opened yesterday, he is awful. Amid British and European actors, Cruise stands out like a sore thumb. He doesn’t even attempt a German accent, his mannerisms are all from his "Jerry Maguire" era, and his earnestness suggests at best some kind of fictional American soldier trying to infiltrate the Luftwaffe. You knew it would be bad, and it is.
I’m more concerned that “Valkyrie” could represent a new trend in filmmaking: Nazi apologia. We know already what Valkyrie is about: a group of German soldiers who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and failed. Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg—referred to in this film constantly as “Stauffenberg”—as if to make him sound less German or something.
On top of that, there is the matter of the uniforms and the set design. Suddenly, we have German officers in World War II who are not wearing arm bands. Their swastikas are now small tokens on chests of medals. They look more like airline pilots than Nazi soldiers. When they meet, it looks like they’re at a lovely retreat in the Adirondacks. Director Bryan Singer is so sparing with his Nazi flags, swastikas, etc that you’d think the Nazis hardly existed. What’s everyone so upset about anyway?
Because in “Valkyrie” Singer opens the door to a dangerous new thought: that the Holocaust and all the other atrocities could be of secondary important to the cause of German patriotism.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I saw it yesterday and while it certainly wasn’t Academy Award winning material it wasn’t that bad of a film. Nice escape from the holiday soppiness.
Yes, you make a good point, Lonesome. There are far too many works on stage and film that try to "resonate" in that way for the moonbat Bush-hating left.
Lucius, please see my previous post to Vision. I mentioned you, and failed to give you a courtesy ping.
Well, I haven’t seen it yet; and of course will reserve my judgment until I do.
But Nazis WERE human. What else were they? When you look at evil, you're looking into a human face.
Well said.
I guess it makes it easier for you to believe that the Nazis where something exceptional, when it is perfectly obvious that any people in a similar situation would have behaved the same way.
Camps to murder men, women, children of those whose religion they disliked or who they considered outcasts from society?
The USSR did the exact same thing, except that their motivation was social class.
Their race is superior to others and they killed in the name of that? Conducting experiments on pregnant women, making soap from dead Jews and lampshades from their skin?
The Japanese did much the same to the Chinese and to western POWs.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but if the new administration follows the desires of some of its political base you and I will find ourselves in a Gulag faster than you can say 'But the Nazis were monsters -- it can't happen here.'
Thanks for the support. I do what I can in an increasingly evil age.
Lucius, another thing that should be pointed out to people like Vision is that the Germans who made lampshades out of human skins were literally one in ten million. As Americans, we would not all want to be lumped in with the vicious insanities of Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Gacy. But all three were Americans, so it was Americans who committed all those horrible crimes.
As someone whom Hitler would have turned into a lampshade, I think that you are rather funny.
This is why educated Romans and Nazis were routinely portrayed in the movies by RP-speaking Brits, and I don’t have any problem with that.
The riddle presents itself when trying to map non-ruling class accents from the film’s subject area onto English-speaking ears. In Oliver Stone’s “Alexander,” Stone notably attempted to distinguish between Greeks and Macedonians by giving the Attic-speaking Greeks the RP-accent and having the Macedonians style various interpretations of Scots accents, to imply the “northern quasi-barbarian” status the Macedonians held in the eyes of the Greeks.
Unfortunately, the American audiences were only puzzled by this, and the British audiences (as is their wont) focused most on debating whether or not the various actors did creditable Scots accents.
Moving all of this over to Germany, the situation would be even worse. Some argue that Bavaria is essentially Germany’s Texas, inhabited by loud, proud and religious hillbillies holding loyalty first to their own homeland, and then, secondarily, to Germany overall. Would it have been advisable to give Stauffenberg the accent of an educated Texan?
I think the History channel or A&E (or some other) did a great piece on this and had explosives experts determine that most likely the size of the table, the open windows and the placement of the charge and size of the charge preventing Hitler from dying. But a couple of the other 42 attempts on Hitlers life were pretty smart.
This article/movie is talking about Nazi soldiers. Not “all Germans” or anyone who happened to live in Germany at the time. I have no idea why you keep bringing that up unless it is a pathetic attempt to “humanize” Nazi soldiers. Nazis are subhuman. Worse than animals.
I've kind of had a respect for each of you over the years. Why do you keep trying to distract from the point of the article? What is your objective in turning an article about Nazi soldiers into a conversation about why we can't fault everyone living in Germany at the time?
No, it's talking about professional German officers who were in the German Army for years before the Nazis took control. They deeply resented what the Nazis had done to the army, and to Germany. One of the great tragedies of that war is that the German people, and the German Army, became victims of the Nazis just like everyone else.
Beyond that, which is all true, the irreducible fact remains that Nazis are indeed human. Reducing them to monstrous untermenschen (the irony!) is a defensive attempt to separate oneself from the contamination of evil, but is fundamentally incorrect.
The evil that the Nazis did is part of the fallen nature of all of humanity; the bloodstains on humanity’s hands go back to Cain and Abel.
Where everybody's a "von this" or "von that" they don't throw it around much.
I sort of expected comedians to give Cruise a hard time about the movie: "Kind of controversial, Tom. You know there are actually people out there who don't like Nazis."
But I can't take Friedman's criticism seriously. Not every German soldier or officer wore a Nazi armband. And there are ought to be enough swastikas in the movie to please Friedman. Some are pretty large.
It sounds like what Friedman wanted was a propaganda film. I didn't think Cruise was that convincing as Stauffenberg, but the film did give a plausible and even gripping account of how the plot played out -- and ultimately failed.
A lot of historical films don't give more than documentaries do. This one did, by showing what it was like at the center of the coup.
They fought, initially, to restore the honour of the German Army, which they felt had been betrayed into defeat in 1918 by the “stab-in-the-back” of the socialist and communist factions within the old regime.
The tipping point was the invasion of France. The General Staff was generally pessimistic, some think even deliberately so in order to encourage peace talks, but Hitler, on his own authority, overruled the General Staff contingency plan, Case Yellow, and instead authorised the von Manstein-Guderian plan of attacking through the Ardennes. When that plan succeeded so spectacularly, the judgment of the German Army command was so completely overturned that it essentially stopped questioning Hitler, conceding that, if its judgment about Case Yellow had been so far wrong, perhaps Hitler indeed had superiour powers of analysis.
Once that happened, the subsequent disasters after the invasion of Russia were nearly inevitable.
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