Reviews

If ever there was a role made for a master actor, one who can wring out the lurking, soulful depths of depravity and insanity, with such intensity it is spellbinding, it is Joaquin Phoenix. From Commodus to Johnny Cash to the guy who falls in love with Her to the incredibly overlooked role he played in Master, the range of this best there is professional is beyond description. His every move, every sound, every painful looking move of the emaciated body he lost 55 plus pounds to play grinds with the grit and scum of the streets of crushing New York. His descent into insanity is a work of art. His laughter was so intense and so biting it will cause nightmares. Others have played tormented minds with great success. Violent, yes. So is the endless bottom of the pit shoveled over to the bottom of the heap of society, one of which he plays to perfection. It's a dark movie. Going insane is dark. And you will witness it line by line and be mesmerized by what you see Phoenix doing in every scene. There is hardly any room in this film for any of the other good actors. Don't miss it.

I'll let an intelligent human being see the film and make up their own mind, but for two salient points:

First, the "critics" and "reviewers"on IMDb without a doubt belong to the world of almost 100% left wingers of the entertainment industry. Trying to get an objective review of anything to do with Hillary from out and out libs is impossible. It doesn't matter that every hit Hillary takes has been supported in writing, in the dozens of books that are out showing what a disgrace she is, have never - not once - been sued for slander, misrepresentation, or false testimony. NOT ONCE. That they ducked out of Hillary's way in the WH was quoted by several WH employees in several books. Her vicious and foul language appears on page after page of literally dozens of books. And the lib reviewers here, like all libs, say that "allegations" are not true. If you are going to review a film based upon its fitting your political mode or not, you should recuse yourself. Sounds like the ultra-left wing Vanity Fair at work. Money talks.

Second, expecting an honest review free of personal political input from a person who is supposedly a viable, open, fair minded writer who supposedly has perspective in a movie such as this is about the same as American colleges today. The vast - well over 90% of American colleges and universities - are so far left that any student in them today fears to open his or her mouth with anything that smacks of center or god forbid Republican views. Since the faculties of most, if not all, of those institutions are out and out liberal democrats, the student who wants to get any sort of a recommendation for grad school learns not to open his or her mouth to challenge the overbearing liberal practice of teaching and putting down at every chance anything not liberal. For example, my alma mater (Bowdoin College) a couple years ago reported that 151 of the 156 faculty were liberals. It is pathetic to see reviewers do the same.

Don't be afraid to see the truth. The reason it is not as well known as it could be ("why haven't I heard this before?") is very simple. If you think the entertainment world is left wing, what do you think the media is?

Ken Burns has done it again. "The Civil War" was a masterpiece. "Baseball" was absolutely superb. And "The War" is another A+ piece of work. Why? Let me count the ways.

1) All wars are hell. This time Burns was able to show what little he felt most humans could suffer without vomiting, some of which was filmed on the spot. Sure, some of the editing was a little choppy. Sure, vast areas of what happened in 1939-1946 had to be omitted by nature of the immensity and complexity of what happened. But most of the younger kids who thinks wars are only fought in the Middle East and who knew nobody in their families who died, or for that matter don't even know the dates of WWII, haven't a clue. So what if they didn't like the music? Hell, they didn't have Ipods or plasma tvs or cable then. Do some reading. Try to envision what absolute hell war is. Burns showed us.

2) For the first time, we were able to hear it - extensively - from people who lived through it. How many wouldn't give a lot to sit down with the folks from those 4 towns who spent hours in interviews, to hear more about it? WWII affected, almost as much as the Civil War, everyone in the country. Go talk to them, kids. Hear what they have to say. You and your generation have never submitted to anything that meant a total effort by your country to remain free. You can't conceive what it means to say that dropping 2 A-bombs of necessity to end the war saved over 500,000 American lives. People today froth at the mouth when they read the media touting the nearly 4,000 dead in Iraq. How about saving 500,000 lives? This war was so immense and affected everything and everyone that every generation of Americans should be made to really study it. Never since have we faced what these people faced. And Burns shows it. All of it.

3) We - you - can't view this documentary in terms you are comfortable with: instant gratification, burning the flag, anti-war demonstrations, cell phones and emails, and the whole plethora of me-me-me that exists today. You need to read what life was really like then, who did what and how they did it, what they believed in, what manners they had, what they were willing to die for. Burns gives you continuous examples of people from 4 American towns for 15 hours to try to tell you what Americans were willing to do to save their way of life from seriously evil sickos who were hell bent on destroying us. Those psychos in the Middle East have the same sort of plan to destroy anything in the west; similar to plans Hitler had to literally own the world and kill off those he felt were in the way and the plans that the Japanese had of making every western country a subservient fiefdom. Read about it. Read a lot about it (if you know how to read) and then watch the Burns doc. See what it took to stop them. Oh, Hitler and Tojo and Stalin, eventually, weren't that bad? They were only comic-book characters? If you believe that, you need a serious education.

4) What happened in 1941-1945 happened. As in all wars throughout history, there were morons in charge of some, heroes in charge of others, misguided attempts, spectacularly successful attempts, incredibly unlucky attempts. But nothing ever so large, on such a scale of planning, training, executing, supplying, and staffing h as ever occurred in the history of man, and probably never will. And Burns eloquently captured some of its essence. Nobody could EVER capture all of it, or even parts of it, on the scale in which it happened. WWII was the last of the romantic wars. During WWII there were still espionage, undergrounds, passwords, night parachutings, spy chains, radio broadcasts, a whole litany of danger that stopped with the Cold War. After that, Korea and Vietnam and now the butchery in Iraq turned into cold, mechanical, medieval barbarism. Burns had to pick and choose the parts that brought the personalities of those from four American towns into view. And he did that very well.