SLAM! The best rip off of the FILM so far

It's a three page article, basically saying what Friedman said how Hollywood now uses the Nazi background in order to tell a story. It's blaming the movie for making Nazi Germany merely to a background.

(...) "But Valkyrie is a great transatlantic misunderstanding. Valkyrie is not a piece of cinematic contemporary history - and was never intended to be. "Valkyrie" is a star-vehicle that uses Nazi Germany as a historical photo-wallpaper for a thriller, that wants to put its star into the best light as possible. And what could be more heroic than trying to kill the greatest villain in world history?

Valkyrie is only the best known among a series of American films that tell completely naively, unhibitedly about Nationalsocialism and even about the Holocaust. One could call it a bursting of a dam: The long lasting tabu, to put the horrors between 1933 and 1945 into pictures and narrations, that also brought Spielberg massive criticism for his filming Schindler's List, whether the movie was morally legitimate - this tabu is completely shattered now. And there is more: Many of these films do not serve history. History serves their stories.

(...) And this is the change of paradigm in dealing with the darkest years of German history. And this is the actualy cinematic meaning of "Valkyrie" - and not that the film will spread the story of Stauffenberg and the other conspirators of July 20th 1944 around the world. It was just consequent that the American celebrity magazine "People" put the film under the genre "action". The star of the film, Crui$e, announced carelessly that he would measure the movie's success at the perspiration in the hand palms of the viewers.

Indeed: Director Bryan Singer reconstructs meticulously and sternly due to the rules of suspense the plan and the execution of the assassination of July 20th 1944. For instance the scene in which Stauffenberg places the briefcase with the explosives right next to Hitler is extended to the outer limits - it lasts longer than in the three German movies that were made about Stauffenberg altogether. "

Then comes a part about how "Valkyrie" is supposed to save Crui$emeister's career by reflecting Stauffenberg's light upon him; how UA is desperate, and that Crui$emeister is box office poison. And how the film is supposed to change how Tommy Gurl is viewed by the audiences.

(...) From the first moment the movie leaves no doubt about its hero being on the right side. "Valykrie" completely ommits the change of mind of Stauffenberg who transformed from a supporter of Hitler to a desperate adversary. The real Stauffenberg for instance wrote to his wife in September 1939 a letter from occupied Poland about the "incredible mob, many Jews and a lot of mixed races. A people that only feels comfortable under the knout. The thousands of prisoners will be good for our agriculture." The movie mentions no word of it. Instead it shows Crui$e from the first scene on as a disillusioned Stauffenberg who writes into his diary that Hitler takes Germany to its downfall.

You don't find this scene in the older script, dated January 7th 2007. The authors wanted to let the movie begin with Hitler's voice, who announces over the radio that another attempt against his life failed. Stauffenberg would have emerged in this version for the first time after ten minutes - very late for a star's appearance.

There is also little left from the aristocratic arrogance with which the authors originally intended their hero to shut off dissidents several times. "Valkyrie" robs Stauffenberg's complexity. He always looks meaty and dashing and now and then sinks his glass eye coolly in the drink of a co-conspirator.

The price the movie pays for this idealisation is very high. You cannot accuse "Valkyrie" of heavy distortion of history. You cannot accuse it of drowning its story in pathos. No. The world of military-bureaucratic world of national socialism is recaptured with dutiful naturalism, the offices, the conference rooms, this familiar ambient of heavy wood, stiff uniforms and dramatically draped flags, and the actors deliver their conspirators' lines in dutiful tones and thoughtfully wrinkled brows. Yet the audience learns little about the motivation of the high ranking military.

This movie is thrilling for about half an hour when the movie tells with logistic precision how the planned coup after the - falsely believed to be successful - assassination starts from Berlin. The viewer gets a sense how history could have taken a different path, if only some tiny details would have been different.

But what one can accuse the movie and what one is forced to accuse it of is its instrumentalisation of history. There is always the sour aftertaste of the impression that the movie makers didn't care too much about this concrete drama at stake, but that this assassination merely serves as a background for the living picture of "heroes in front of swastikas". And that they don't really try to figure out the ambivalences or try to find an original artifice - beyond the sepia toned narration - to the original historic subject matter. There is a difference between a Stauffenberg fighting for his own country and a Tom Crui$e fighting for his career.

In America where a quarter of high school graduates know that Adolf Hitler reigned Germany during WW II, Valkyrie will pass as a mediocre genre film, where it will never get too great critical acclaim and not too high box office numbers, either.

And the next Hitler assassination lies ahead: The brute of directors, Quentin Tarrantino is shooting "Inglorious Bastards" in Berlin. This film is based on an Italian trash movie from the 70s. But with stars like Brad Pitt, Tarantino turns this into a cinematic event that nobody will pass by.

"Inglorious Bastards" tells about a bunch of bold US soldiers, French resistance fighters and German defectors who want to blow up Hitler and his leading clique in a cinema in Paris. Nothing about this story is true. The script begins with the line "Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France…" "Inglorious Bastards" is a cracking noisy Nazi fairy tale.

Welcome to the new normalcy."


http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,597558,00.html

Boycott Valkyrie.

Wow, you must really, really, really hate Tom Cruise. I just watched "Tropic Thunder" and he was funny in it, even though you could tell it was Tom Cruise in a badly made fat suit. But playing "Fearless Leader" in what was supposed to be an Oscar Baiter is another story.

Speaking of worst rip-offs, wait until next year when "Push" comes out. It's a carbon copy of "Jumper" in every way.