Ha, you’ve been Rickrolled! I know I’m supposed to hide it behind a link, but that’s clearly beyond my talents. Now, the end of March is fast approaching, Netflix will dump a bunch of movies, and I promised a vote on what I watch next. Here are your three choices. Vote under the first comment below, and of course you can skip reading this review:
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: You voted down 21 Jump Street, so here’s another reboot of a show I once watched, now starring Channing Tatum. Even as a prepubescent, I could tell the Baroness was sexy, so let’s see her in the flesh. And I wonder if Joseph Gordon-Levitt fully transforms into Cobra Commander, including the voice. No spoilers please.
There Will Be Blood: I recognize that Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis are giants of film, but I’ve only ever seen Boogie Nights and The Last of the Mohicans. Can their combined talents make a 2 1/2 hour movie with Paul Dano’s punchable face worth watching?
300: I’ve seen the parodies and the memes, but not the source. I know Zack Snyder gets bagged on a lot for being all grim flash with no substance. But if this film is just impressive visual style, I might be okay with that.
Now, on to The General’s Daughter. I’m giving a warning for both spoilers and disturbing subject matter (sexual assault). If you want to stop reading now, my review of both book and movie boils down to “eh, it’s all right”.
Decades ago, before age and constant internet decimated my attention span, I loved reading fiction. I was poor and had lots of free time, so after trips to the library I would consume up to several hundred pages until the late hours. Stephen King’s prose just flies by, in a good way. And if I liked one of an author’s books, I kept reading them. A friend recommended The Gold Coast, which author Nelson DeMille had pitched as Godfather meets Great Gatsby. I honestly believe it lived up to that hype. This collision between the upper crust and mafiosos was riveting, funny, and sexy. I’m talking “Kleenex and hand lotion kept close by” sexy. So I devoured all the DeMille novels I could find, and discovered an impressive variety of thrillers.
Any of those DeMille novels had the potential to be a fine movie. If The Gold Coast had been released ten years later, it could have caught a Mafia zeitgeist where The Sopranos and Analyze This became big hits, and gotten greenlit for its own feature. Another favorite book, Plum Island, seems tailor-made to be a big screen mystery thriller. If I didn’t want to spoil things for potential readers, I could give a Stefon-esque litany of great things about it. “This book has everything: adventure, sex, mystery, p***** b****...” Kevin Spacey makes for a terrific slimy bad guy. And if he ever gets a chance at redemption and they make a Plum Island movie, he can play the villain. Somehow, the only DeMille novel to get the big screen treatment was The General’s Daughter, and I can think of only one reason: the success of A Few Good Men.
Like that huge hit released seven years earlier, The General’s Daughter focuses on a mystery within the armed forces, and the military officers tasked with meting out justice. It’s a good thing I put this review off for a few weeks, because I can now continue the John Travolta-palooza that Franko started with Primary Colors and Grease. When we first meet army officer Paul Brenner, he seems dumb but charismatic, insert Travolta joke here. But that too-much southern accent is fake, because he’s really an undercover agent on a mission. I can’t quite grasp the hierarchy and military titles, so let’s just say Travolta is Army Justice personified, with the authority to investigate and arrest anyone in the Army (foreshadowing!) His mission is cut short when the cute officer he was flirting with, Captain Elisabeth Campbell, is found naked and strangled to death, while secured to the ground by rope and tent stakes. This instructor in psyops (foreshadowing! I’ll stop now) is also the titular general’s daughter.
Brenner is reunited and teams up with old lover Sara Sunhill, a fellow army officer and rape specialist played by Madeleine Stowe. She spends the whole movie dressed in stylish white clothes. Maybe they wanted a contrast to army uniforms and combat fatigues, or they were going for some type of symbolism. Or maybe they just wanted to feature Stowe, a candidate for most beautiful movie actress of the past forty years, looking absolutely amazing. Brenner and Sunhill spend their time together bickering and making progress on the case. As an author, DeMille has a template he often follows. There’s the male protagonist: manly, sardonic, great at his job. And the attractive woman he teams up with, who can only resist his charms for so long. It’s a cliche Harry Sue, but DeMille does show that the man is flawed and the woman is competent and willing to call him on his crap. It’s like a much better version of Dan Brown, and some of Brown’s work I actually like.
The mystery is solved at the end, and it’s devastating. We assume that Captain Campbell was overpowered and raped before she was killed, but that’s just a feint. The true crime came during her time as an accomplished West Point cadet. Some jealous male colleagues got her alone during a training exercise, staked her to the ground, and gang-raped her. It somehow gets worse from there. Before going to see his daughter, General Campbell meets with some other military brass. These “men” don’t want the incident to make news, because it would hurt the army’s image (by which they mean, their own careers). And they don’t think the perpetrators can be found (they don’t want to put forth the effort). So the general goes to the hospital and tries to convince his near-comatose daughter, that what happened was no big deal. This ultimately destroys her.
So while Captain Campbell pretends to be the perfect Army officer, she’s waging her own psyops war against her father. She sleeps with any man on base she can and even makes BDSM tapes of some encounters, trying to humiliate the general. When he threatens her with court-martial, she throws a Hail Mary. She has a trusted colleague recreate the original crime by leaving her naked and staked to the ground, and arranges to confront her father with what he helped cover up. He admonishes her and just leaves her there. It barely matters which of her lovers finds her, is rejected when he tries to comfort her, and strangles her in a rage before killing himself when caught. Brenner and Sunhill track down the original perpetrators, and Brenner informs the general that his career is effectively over.
I postulated that this movie only came about because A Few Good Men was so successful. Now I can’t help but compare them, and this movie was found wanting. Travolta and Stowe make a decent enough pair, and the supporting cast is solid. But James Cromwell as the general just can’t compete with Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup. And Travolta confronting the general in his study pales next to Cruise yelling at Nicholson in a courtroom. DeMille may write a fine novel, but Aaron Sorkin’s script, adapted from his play, is much more compelling on screen. (BTW, when I listed a bunch of movies I previously saw before they left Netflix, I forgot The Social Network). Solid filmmaking, but not a great experience. And DeMille’s written better books.
Thoughts:
- To any streaming service out there (Netflix, Amazon Prime, https://www.whattimeisitrightnow.com/): I believe The Gold Coast could totally work as a limited series. And spend whatever is needed to get brand-new Oscar winner Jessica Chastain to play the aristocratic, beautiful redhead Susan Sutter. I hope she’s comfortable riding a horse.
- Okay, one more DeMille rave. The Talbot Odyssey is an ‘80s novel about a Soviet plan to destroy the U.S., that I enjoyed reading even though the Cold War had ended, and thank god we don’t have to worry about Russia anymore. It centered around a bunch of rich smug fucks who thought they were better than everyone, but were at least willing to lay down their lives for their country. There was one memorable character I’ll call “Bob”. Bob was a suckup par excellence, even joining his bosses in their own hobbies. His wife was sleeping around and not even trying to hide it. One day Bob’s boss calls him in and utters this fantastic, non-HR-approved line, “Bob, your wife’s fucking for everyone, so what are we going to do about it?” Okay, those hobbies I mentioned included skydiving and shooting. So we discover (and so does Bob) that he’s a trained paratrooper, who’s now armed and floating down toward the Russian Embassy under cover of the night. When we last see Bob, he and his wife are sharing a victory canoodle. It won’t last.
- I’m surprised the actress who plays Captain Campbell, Leslie Stefanson, wasn’t more successful. She’s beautiful, shows a vivacious personality in early scenes with Travolta, and is willing to do the tough scenes the role required. But she admits those scenes weren’t easy for her to do, and finding quality roles as an actress is also difficult. She left acting behind to be a sculptor and start a family with James Spader.
- Nowadays, we may find that an actor we like, say, has outrageous political views that they happily spew on Twitter. Or they’ve engaged in awful behavior with women much younger than them. Or there are rumors of drug abuse. And we have to decide if we want to stop seeing their work because of that. If you want to do that, I can respect it. But personally, I’ll continue to enjoy their work, but not go out of my way to view it. All that being said, James Woods is magnetic, and the scenes with Travolta interrogating him are really good. Almost makes you wish he ended up as the villain; he could’ve given Colonel Jessup a run for his money.
- Woods’ “suicide” leads to one of the most suspenseful, visually striking scenes. Travolta and company come to his house, but something’s not right. Then they see it, a spray of blood on the window. And suddenly, a cat’s paw appears in the midst of that blood splatter. When they go inside, Woods is now a bloody mess, and his cat is just casually walking around off to the side. Hey, if I die, I don’t need my cat practically kneeling over my body and shouting “Why!!!” to the heavens. Let Nibbles move on and be spared from that pain.
- There was a scene I loved from the book that didn’t make the movie, so I picked it up from the library and found it. Brenner sees a recruiting poster featuring Captain Campbell herself ready for battle, with rifle, radiophone, unfolded map, checking her watch. He asks Sunhill if she sees the subliminal sexual message, no, point to it, well I can’t point to it, it’s subliminal. So he describes what he sees, gun is obvious phallic object, map and watch represent desire to have sex, calling a guy on radiophone, saying here are my coordinates, you have 15 minutes to find me. And on my way to finding that scene, Sunhill is talking about how hard it can be for a woman in the Army, and Brenner snarks “Try being a white man these days”. This book is thirty years old. Imagine what Brenner would be Tweeting today.
- Simon West directed this film in between action hits Con Air and the first Lara Croft movie. There was an early action scene not in the book that I thought was unnecessary, but it was well-shot. In the foreground, Travolta silently escapes through a ceiling hatch on his houseboat, while in the background, a shadow with an assault rifle stalks outside the door. West later went on to direct the first two episodes of Keen Eddie, a fun American detective in England comedy-drama that I liked for the short time it lasted (“I guess I’ll be taking the stairs, then.”) Oh, and West started out directing music videos, including one that has been viewed over one billion times.
Next up is ... Labyrinth! Did adult me enjoy this kid’s movie with some dark and sexy undercurrents? How much will I just talk about David Bowie? Do you want to continue the talk on David Bowie in the comments?
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