omoo22

"The Dirty Dozen" plays out as an increasingly perverse, puerile and pathetic male fantasy, taking us deeper and deeper into the twisted stupidity of a certain type of machismo which glorifies bullying, violence, misogyny and ego gratification in place of functional social relations. It achieves this quite efficiently, with a reasonable standard of acting and film-making. The first three quarters of the film could be defended as brainless fun for certain kinds of people, but the finale descends into an indefensible quagmire of incompetence which is even more offensive for its blasé justification of atrocity than for its utterly ludicrous depiction of military action. The patterns of male bonding and conflict depicted in the film are laughable in their combination of gratuitous nastiness and infantile naïveté.

Having no connection at all to the realities of the conflict depicted, the realities of conflict itself, nor the realities of any personal or cultural interaction at all may not make a "war movie" offensive in itself. However, when the result is as vacuous and idiotic as it is here, it can be argued that this sort of film insults anyone involved with or interested in any of the subjects it touches upon (hello "Inglourious Basterds"...).

I went from cautiously liking this film in the first 40 minutes to despising it in the last hour or so. The schmaltzy sentimentality accumulates and creeps up on you, until towards the end you feel overdosed on insincerity to the point of nausea. The emotion portrayed is utterly hollow and manipulative in its dishonesty. By apparently trying to copy/compete with Hollywood at its most disingenuous, this film surpasses the worst of Hollywood hypocrisy.

There is plenty of style in the technical aspects of the film-making, but for all the "realistic" computer graphics recreating the city of Tokyo in 1958, no amount of vacuous slickness can give any honesty, reality or authenticity to the people and situations. The empty "rebirth symbolism" of the construction of the tower is an appropriate reflection of the empty film itself; is the film's soullessness symptomatic of the soullessness of the country's "rebirth" since the destruction of 60 years ago?

1968 was a pretty good year, the first in colour, featuring some lively performances, colourful outfits, and a reasonable ratio of OK to awful songs. Belgium's and Switzerland's songs won me, even if in Switzerland's case the song was almost overshadowed by the (Italian) singer's tight bright orange suit. The colour orange and polo necks were recurring motifs throughout. Yugoslavia provided some comic relief late in the piece, and Norway's Odd Borre lived up to his first name, but arguably not his second.

The "controversy" of the result seems to be basically sour grapes on the part of the English media and public that their Cliff's dreadful "Congratulations" was defeated at the last post by Spain's (marginally less dreadful) "La la la". Apart from the "star" attraction of Cliff himself, why was anyone assuming his vacuous song would win? I guess "Puppet on a string" had won the previous year, and it's not much better - the same songwriters, I think. The REAL controversy was kept for the following year...

This is ultimately a fairly objectionable movie. It offers vacuousness poorly disguised as profundity, and stereotype poorly disguised as cultural commentary. The characters may be realistic in their emptiness, but I doubt this was the filmmakers' intention. The title itself seems to try to offer an excuse for the film's vacuousness; an excuse that seemed to pay off in terms of popular and critical praise. The film is not exactly boring, since it does keep you waiting for some insight or emotional pull, which is unfortunately never forthcoming. Scarlett Johansson is gorgeous (and talented), though, and fortunately usually does a better job in selecting roles.

Ridiculous, nauseating doggerel with terrible acting; ineptly, superficially, and condescendingly trawling all the most banal clichés about Tuscany and Italy, divorce and midlife. The main actor nervously grimaces her way through the film, struggling to portray the appropriate level of smug, self-congratulatory self-pity the worthless character and script call for. I'm sure the book was bad, but it can't have been this bad! The camera is permanently fitted with a vomit-yellow "Tuscan" lense filter (perhaps the Tuscan sun wasn't Tuscan enough?), which they forgot to remove when the scene shifts to Rome and (how imaginative!) the Amalfi coast. You've never seen the white marble of Rome's Vitorio Emanuele II monument looking so yellow... I mean Tuscan. One of the worst movies ever, and therefore quite worth a look.

Despite managing to give fleeting impressions of importance and quality, this film is a complete put-on. The long "set-piece" scenes (wedding, Russian roulette, etc.) are much discussed, usually either in the context of being "essential for character development" or "boring". In fact they're a delaying mechanism behind which the filmmaker attempts to hide his lack of storytelling skills. Once he does try to move things along, awkwardly jumping without explanation or exposition from one bloated set-piece to another, you can see the reason for his procrastination - despite being desperate to give the impression of profundity and truth, he really has nothing to say. The actors go a long way toward diverting attention from the film's awkward vacuousness, by giving false and short-lived impressions of character and narrative, but this falls apart whenever the filmmaker attempts to make anything "happen" narrative-wise.

De Niro, Walken and company deserve some recognition for some good acting, albeit for such a misguided cause. Ultimately, despite some controversy, many of the film's questionable portrayals of Vietnam, Vietnamese, America, Americans and war are to be condemned more for their cinematic silliness than for their historical inaccuracy.