The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

"Boys Own"

or

"I Have Good News and I Have Bad News"

The Second World War makes for fascinating history and fascinating reading. The convergence of warfare, technology, and the dark arts of espionage fairly boggles the mind that so much was going on in the background while foot-soldiers and pilots and sailors were slugging it out on the battlefields. The Allies would do anything to gain an advantage. Whether it was Operation Mincemeat, or Operation Crossbow, or Operation Anthropoid or "The Ladies" at Bletchley Park or Alan Turing's "computing machine" or the spies and conspirators at "Camp X", so much was done behind the scenes of "the lines" to disrupt enemy operations or lead them astray that soon the conspirators got caught up in their own chicanery. When secrets were discovered of enemy bombing runs, the information could not be used to save lives lest the enemy discover the Allies' advantage. One cannot calculate the lives that were lost...and needlessly...in order to preserve that most transitory of things, military secrets.

 

They make for good reading,* but Hollywood never seems to think that they'd make good stories unless they're blown up (and real good) to cartoonish proportions. That Operation Crossbow film is a good example of that.

 

Gus March-Phillips in the hirsute form of Henry Cavill

And so is The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Guy Ritchie's new film, which tells the story (sort of) of "Operation Postmaster" an "unofficial" British operation to disrupt the supply chain to German U-boats (or anything else) by dispatching ships that the Special Operations Executive suspected were running arms for the Germans. It was a short operation—roughly 30 minutes—where what was called The Small Scale Raiding Force, under the command of Gus March Phillips, hijacked three ships from the Spanish harbor of Fernando Po in Spanish Guinea, while the ships' officers were being thrown a party ashore (by an SOE agent). The SSRF delivered the ships to the Navy a few days later.

Lassen, March-Phillips and Hayes update a German war-ship on the floppy state of its captain.

Well, that sounds exciting enough, but the screenwriters aren't happy with that, so they invented rescues, subterfuges, feints, a honey trap, and various bloody attacks to complicate the story and make it more of an episode of "Mission: Impossible" than what actually happened, no matter the "Based on a True Story" card that starts the film. The filmmakers take it too far and not far enough—the actors hardly resemble their real-life counterparts and their fighting skills are far more athletic and balletic than the training required of what was called a "butcher and bolt" unit. And although much play is made of the crew being "'A'-Team" "mad," the SSRF has been more described as amphetamine-popping sociopaths (all in a good cause, of course).

In the movie, that's Ian Fleming in the middle and Gubbins on the right.

(Fleming wasn't even in this branch, although he did do some spy-work)

So, don't believe what you see—it's not a true story in the way its being portrayed—and I'll shut up about the discrepancies and just talk about what's there on-screen, although don't be surprised by a pervasive grumbling tone.

It seems that England is having difficulties with German U-boats patrolling the Atlantic, disrupting shipping lines and destroying relief efforts sent from the United States—which is still reluctant about entering the war with troops, despite Germany goose-stepping all the way to France. For Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear, unrecognizable in make-up), this is infuriating: even if America did send troops, there's a good possibility that the troop transports would be sunk, and any aggressive action is opposed by His Majesty's Government and by the British Navy. Churchill decides to take covert action through the SOE—"Hitler is not playing by the rules and so neither are we"—to take out any boats they can find at sea and try to disrupt the German's supply lines to the U-boats.

SOE's head Brigadier Colin Gubbins (Cary Elwes), with help from his adjutant Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox) spring Gustavus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) out of irons and tells him of their plans to sink the Duchessa d'Aosta, an Italian merchant ship docked at the port of Santa Isabel on the Spanish island of Fernando Po that reconnaissance has determined is a supply ship for the German U-boats. March-Phillips is informed that two SOE agents, the already established-in-Fernando Po Heron (Babs Olusanmokun, who has become a favorite of mine since playing the ship's doctor on "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds") and Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González, who I'm glad is there even though Marjorie Stewart had no part of the mission) are already on their way to Fernando Po by train to lay the ground-work for their operation.

March-Phillips, while taking the time to mooch booze, cigars and Fleming's lighter, is understandably skeptical ("We both know I'm not very popular with this current administration) and he warns that the troops he wants to gather for the mission are a bit unorthodox ("You won't like them...they're all mad"), and is reassured that he has discretion as the job doesn't officially exist (nor will it ever exist, seeing as they're going to be attacking a Spanish port and Spain is being obstinately neutral in the war as its Prime Minister, Franco, is obstinately a fascist).

One of his proposed team, the master planner of his outfit, Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer) is a prisoner of the Nazis, and March-Phillips and his crew—Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson, streaming's "Reacher"), Henry Hayes** (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), and explosives expert Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding)—do a side-trip rescue on the way, using their Brixham fishing trawler, Maid of Honour, as their transport.

That's a lot of set-up exposition, but one of the strengths of Richie's direction—and of the screen-writers—is that it all gets taken care of quickly, amusingly, and lets you know who's who and what's what before settling into the details and taking care of the action, which is fast, brutal, and probably far beyond what the actual team doing the mission did. Oh, they were perfectly capable of filleting a man with a knife—as happens frequently in the movie—but, the action is just too choreographed to be in any way realistic. Efficient and fast, certainly, but, once a jugular is slit, why keep stabbing?

There's also an air of pushing the "aren't we crazy" throughout, an inherent smugness that carries on throughout the movie. Usually, Cavill is the most visible culprit of this in whatever he plays, and, yes, in the film's first 45 minutes, he succumbs to that—Florence Pugh's line "What a poser..." kept coming to mind—but, eventually he settles down, stops grand-standing, and towards the end, is a welcoming commanding presence and then, towards the end, exquisitely delivers a good James Bond-ish line: "Marjorie! Over-dressed and under-dressed at the same time...as usual."

An aside: Here's an issue that irked me—The "James Bond" angle. Sure, they uncomfortably shoe-horned Ian Fleming (Bond's creator) into the narrative, then capped the movie by saying that Cavill's character, March-Phillips, was Fleming's inspiration for Bond, but I've heard others, including William Stephenson, were Fleming's model—there has been so much speculation and it's usually based solely on trying to make some correspondent's subject matter more important (or at least "buzz-worthy") than it would be without it. Fleming saw a lot of spy-craft during the war, but I think he got his main inspiration by looking in the mirror and fantasizing.

It's a good adventure flick with the added bonus that SOME of it is true, and, surprisingly, in some of the details that they don't make a point of, but it's a bit of over-kill on many levels. War is butchery, after all, and there's quite a bit of evisceration in this film. At one point, in taking over the ships, Ritchson's Anders goes through picking off crew-men, starting with bow and arrows (his specialty), then knives, then an axe, all done with a blood-thirsty glee. "Good times". But, maybe that wouldn't have been as entertaining as what the "mad" "crazy" "sociopathic" members of the SSRF really did when the took over those ships in 1942.

Those crew-men that didn't put up a fight they took prisoner, 29 in all, and turned them over to the British Navy.

The Small Scale Raiding Force—No. 62 Commando

 

Top: Maj. Gustavus March-Phillips, Geoffrey Appleyard,  Graham Hayes, Anders Lassen

Bottom: Marjorie Stewart, Major Colin 'M' Gubbins

The Target
 

* One of my most enjoyable times reading one of these histories is "The Man Called Intrepid" by William Stevenson, published in 1976, about William Stephenson. It's fascinating reading, but some of its validity has been called into question.

 

** The man's name was actually Graham Hayes, and can't think of a logical reason why they might have changed it.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

We're Off to See The Lizard, the Marvelized Version of Kong

or

Four-Walling in the Time of Covid

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures have been making their own version of superhero movies for the past few years, starting with Godzilla in 2014, followed by Kong:Skull Island, and Godzilla: King of Monsters. The last movie teased a battle between the two movie-title monsters, now in the "Monarch" Monsterverse, referred to as "Titans" who usually hang out in the Hollow Earth, until we do something stupid to bring 'em out in the open. 

Personally, I think what brought out these movies was Guillermo del Toro's 2013 film of Pacific Rim, where he channeled his love of big monsters duking it out in big modern—vulnerable—cities. The filmed from a cell-phone version of Cloverfield (2008) might have had something to that...inspired as it is by Bong Joon Ho's The Host (2006) and Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong (2005). All that chance to use modern computer graphics and psuedo-technology to make a movie about big monsters fighting appeals to the child (and WWF fan) in all of us. If they didn't make money, they'd disappear into the sea with the setting sun— like Godzilla, but without the buzz-headache from hitting electrical lines.

So, here comes Godzilla vs. Kong, the mash-up of the two tent-poles in the "Monarch" Monsterverse, and "The Top of the Ticket" if one were to see this as an evening of boxing. It is a goofy affair, mixing up traditions of the earlier Toho films (with a much larger scale), a little Jules Verne mixed in for exotica, and a little "zhuzh" from the Marvel Universe to add merchandisable personality, and to keep the fights from seeming like endless slugfests. It also leeches any identifiable humanity out of its story, and, for that matter, The Earth, relegating people to "slow natives" status, and "chutes and ladders" to connect the big fights (of which there are four).

The film has four primary locations: Skull Island—home of King Kong—which is now encircled by a force-field enclosing the "King of the Beasts" from wandering into people's neighborhoods and eating their houses; Pensacola, Florida, where the APEX corporation is engineering A.I. technology with advanced robotics; the Antarctic, where a Monarch research station has made a foray into the "Hollow Earth" deep in the Earth (but wouldn't Skull Island be a more logical entryway, since that's where these beasties have come from?); and Hong Kong, where APEX has a vast engineering facility. With me so far? Good, because you'll get lost soon enough.

At Skull Island, Kong is being studied by Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), the so-called "Kong Whisperer" who's a bit like Dian Fossey, except that her studies of The Big Guy are facilitated with the help of a native Iwi girl named Jia (Kaylee Hottle), a deaf-mute who can communicate with Kong. She is (evidently) the last Iwi tribesperson, her parents and everybody else being reduced to Skull-walker fodder or Kong toe-jam. Dr. Andrews has adopted the girl, and, as such, the whole movie would make damning evidence at a Child Welfare hearing.

She is approached by Dr. Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård), a former Monarch scientist, and developer of the "Hollow Earth" theory (which conjectures that the Earth doesn't have a core so much as a hollow center, like a chocolate bunny, from whence all the "Titans" have emerged, and evidently has never heard of the term "lava". As we get to witness (sort of) Godzilla has gone "rogue" and attacked the APEX facility in Pensacola, and Lind asks Andrews to use Kong to get a powerful energy source that emanates from the Hollow Earth to use as a weapon against The Lizard, should he ever show up and attack again. "Sounds nuts, Nathan. Even for you," she counters and then agrees to take Kong and Jia, and shackle him to a transport for a trip to Antarctica. "I regret this already," she rehearses for her trial. But, not as much as she's gonna regret it.

What caused Godzilla to attack the APEX plant is unknown to the public, but it might have something to do with a power source that is being developed there under the jurisdiction of its CEO, the laughably hissable Walter Simmons (Demián Bechir), and it is he who has recruited Lind to find and contain the "Hollow Earth" "life force" because A) they can use it against Godzilla unless he wants to exert his "cancel culture" privileges on APEX, and B) he can use it to (dare I say it?) RULE THE WORLD. Elon Musk would have started a travel agency to "Hollow Earth" but, no, Simmons wants all the power he can, and he's not going to stop at voter suppression.

This is all suspected by wackadoodle conspiracy pod-caster (and former APEX employee) Bernie Hayes (Bryan Tyree Henry) who was stealing APEX secrets at the time of Godzilla's attack, and he has a big fan in Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown) who has seen Godzilla up-close (in King of the Monsters) and happens to have a Dad (Kyle Chandler) who's a research scientist—he invented the ORCA device in King of the Monsters—and a Mom who was killed by Godzilla in the same movie. But, she doesn't hold a grudge; she and school-pal Josh Valentine (Julian Dennison) steal his brother's van and seek out Bernie to help him in his investigations, looking for clues in the rubble of APEX. What they find is that APEX has another site in Hong Kong and faster than you can say "convenient plot contrivance" they find a convenient plot conveyance to get them to Hong Kong.

The doctors manage to get Kong to Antarctica, but not before the first of the battles between Kong and Godzilla, this time using Navy ships as both weapons and foot-falls, and to avoid any more meetings—Andrews keeps coming up with these little factoids ("Kong bows to no one," There can't be two Alpha Titans," "They have an ancient rivalry") like she was simultaneously Kong's promoter and ring-announcer, even though, she has as much knowledge (or psychological understanding) as the crazy podcaster does. They helicopter a sleeping Kong to Antarctica—Helicopters aren't all that good at high-altitude, cold mountain rescues, and their flights are under heavy restrictions in Antarctica, but, by this time, I've already thrown away any high expectations as dubious and abandoned my skepticism. It couldn't have come at a better time, as at that point, Kong, the docs and the kid with a bunch of APEX merc's all take a trip down the biggest rabbit-hole in the world and arrive at Hollow Earth...no molten core, no crushing pressure...it's a prehistoric paradise with a rocky ceiling for a sky.

And that's about where my "sense of wonder" died. The "Godzilla" have a rich history of fantasy, quirkiness and camp kitsch, evolving from a fantastical cautionary tale of messing with the ecological balance of Nature into forays of adolescent giddiness. This one is in the latter camp. The monster battles are CGI wonders—if one doesn't wonder about casualties—and even have their own humor imagining these behemoths planting haymakers like pugilists and slamming skulls into buildings like overgrown children doing battle in a room full of furniture. It's semi-amusing, even when one questions why the CGI department hedged on putting an atmospheric haze on distant objects, making the cityscapes look like actual models—of the type the Toho studios used to throw around their guys in rubber suits—and simultaneously paying homage to the past, while compromising their attempts at photorealism.

They're the "draw" of the movie, certainly the uninspired script isn't, with its undeserved aphorisms and its pointless reaction-jolts ("Oh, this doesn't look good!"), its transitions that happen just because they have to (how does Chandler's Dr. Russell get from Florida to Hong Kong so fast?) and techno-schtick without even an attempt at trying to explain what the hell is happening and why (besides "this is a science beyond our understanding"). What would be the point? One more haymaker or body-slam and it concusses right out of your mind.

And they give Kong a big glowing axe. Any reason besides Thor-identification? I couldn't see any. Godzilla can atomic breath a hole through the Earth's crust into Hollow World? News to me. And I'm still trying to wrap my mind around there being sunlight in "Hollow World" in the center of the Earth. But, the biggest question I have is...in the midst of a pandemic, THIS is the movie Warner Brothers decided to "four-wall" on multiple-plex screens? Whoever thought that up has cajones bigger than Kong's!

The actors are brave, saying their lines and keeping straight faces. But, they're completely unnecessary to this enterprise, as worthless as story-logic, and regarded just as less. They're mere grout—no, less than that, spackle to cover up holes in the fight-fest. They might as well be Ring girls holding up "Round" signs, filling up time between bells. The lack of character motivation except the cartoon variety indicates that in our entertainment, the beasts have won. With all the ruckus and rumble, who needs human beings?

Welcome to Marwen

The Island of Misfit Toys
or
The Wartime-Love-Child of G.I.Joe and Malibu Barbie

The story of Mark Hogancamp would be an interesting one, if it wasn't so goddamned tragic. An illustrator of some note, Hogancamp was also a blackout drunk who would have surely come to a bad end eventually...if he hadn't been savagely beaten by a bunch of punks at his favorite watering hole and left for dead. Found in the street in a coma by a bar worker, his injuries included severe head trauma and limited motor skills that only strenuous rehab allowed him to walk again. When he emerged from treatment, he was a changed man, completely—he could walk but he couldn't draw, his drinking urges were gone, and all of his memories were completely erased. All he remembered of the attack is the word "queer" (he had mentioned that he liked to wear women's shoes) and Tammy Wynette singing "Stand By Your Man" on the jukebox. 

And he had a crippling case of PTSD, that forced him to rarely venture away from his house.

He walled himself there, afraid to venture out unless it was on the safest of journeys—to the bar (where he worked odd jobs) and to the local hobby store, mostly. But, his creative urges never completely submerged. He couldn't draw anymore; he could barely sign his name. Instead, he began to make photographs—creating his own little world of World War II images, set in the mythical Belgian town of Marwen—"Mar" for his name and "Wen" for the bar-maid, Wendy, who found him broken in the street that night and saved his life.

Hogancamp's images are odd and powerful, moving between realism and fantasy—the details so scrupulous, the vehicles so weathered, that I've seen some passed around as actual war photographs on the internet* (because social media is so TRUTHFUL!**) with the protagonist—a flyer named Captain Hoagie who crashes into the town of Marwen, inhabited by strong, capable women who protect it, with the lone exception of Marwen's witch, the evil Dejah Thoris,*** as well as the parade of Nazi's who torment Hoagie, that he be saved by Marwen's women. Hogancamp's story was told in a 2010 documentary Marwencol, which made the rounds and garnered enough attention for Hogancamp's "art installation" that it threatens to interfere with his disability checks on which he depends.

Hogancamp's story (external and internal) is the basis of the new project of Robert Zemeckis, the director for whom reality never seems good enough, expanding his stories with extensive special effects, even choosing to abandon reality completely with films depending completely on motion capture, even extending to the lead performances of its expensive stars.

He starts out Welcome to Marwen, not by introducing Hogancamp (played in the film by Steve Carell, but by introducing his inner world as we watch Captain Hogie on a bombing raid high above Belgium. Pretty soon, the air is filled with flak and Hogie's plane is hit and starts losing control. As the wings catch fire, Hogie struggles to regain control and ultimately crashes in a shallow river. When he bails out, his shoes are on fire ("Goddamn flammable Army-issue boots!"), and after a jump in the mud puts it out, a peeling off of the soles reveals the his feet are segmented...like a doll's.

Hogie finds an overturned vehicle as he makes his way down a Belgian road. Inside the vehicle is a suitcase filled with "frilly under-things." And a pair of high heeled pumps. He puts them on and is satisfied ("Not bad. Not bad at all."). But, confronted by a group of Nazi officers, they get the drop on him and begin to mock him for wearing high-heels. They attack him, leaving a nasty scar across his face, but before they can kill him, five women pop up out of the grass, firing rifles riddling the Germans, who fall to the ground in frozen doll-like poses that defy gravity.

[CLICK] The plasticene look of the figures are revealed to be dolls being photographed by Mark with an old Pentax camera, perpetually smoking a Pall-Mall, talking to his figures, adjusting, making still-lives of the story in his head. When he's done, he tidies up his little town of Marwen that he's erected in his side-yard—then, he opens one of the false facades of Marwen on his house which serves as a hobbit-heighth entrance inside to his intricately decorated house, split between dimensions of life-size (like Mark) and 1/6th scale (like his figures). He drops his dead Nazi soldiers into a plastic Tupperware bin marked R.I.P. A good day's work.

He avoids calls from his lawyer, who wants him to appear at the sentencing of the creeps who assaulted him. He notes a new neighbor, Nicol (Leslie Mann) moving in across the street, and the arrival—then forced leaving—of her abusive ex-boyfriend, Kurt (Neil Jackson), then his Russian caregiver, Anna (Gwendoline Christie, and yes, she's one of the "women of Marwen") stops by with groceries and his subscription of anxiety med's—he takes one and goes to bed.

This is his day, but his nights are restless, plagued by PTSD nightmares that he's being strafed by those five Nazi's (who we'll see resemble the creeps who beat him up) while Hogie and the women defend themselves at the Marwen pub, "The Ruined Stocking."

On good days, he'll load up his army into their jeep for a long stroll down the street—the better to give the jeep a weathered look—to do some work at the bar where he was attacked, cleaning up, working in the kitchen, check in with Carlala (Eiza González, another of the women), then visit the hobby store where he finds his figures and their fashions, under the guidance of Roberta (Merritt Wever), who is fond of him and encourages his artwork, helping to set up a gallery showing in New York.

Zemeckis' movie veers between Hogancamp's reality and fantasy life, which creates a dramatic tension between the mock-heroic brio of the dolls and the fragile, damaged reality that he lives in the day-to-day. The two wage war with his psychological well-being and it bleeds over into the movie, as well. The tonal shift is the biggest issue with Welcome to Marwen (although it's probably the reason Zemeckis was drawn to the project in the first place, working with scenarist Caroline Thompson, who wrote Edward Scissorhands, The Addams Family, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride).

"To the women of Marwen"—they drink alcohol; he drinks coffee.

Carell's Hogancamp is such a troubled, docile figure that you get a severe disconnect with the fast-paced, occasionally goofy rambunctiousness that the doll-fantasy sequences evoke. You wonder how Carell's Hogancamp can keep these weird hyper goings-on in his head without exploding or going nuclear. Mentally, those sequences veer into "fight" mode, but his actions in the real world are of the "flight" variety, and, although it tries to come up with a scenario where the two can be resolved, it doesn't really work, not to any degree of satisfaction. At the end, Hogancamp appears far more courageous and risk-taking, but how he gets there is inexplicable.

His relationship with neighbor Nicol is also troublesome. Yes, Hogancamp is damaged. Yes, he is barely under control and (mostly) harmless to anyone but himself. But, the way his fantasies influence his reality—especially, in regards to her—makes him pursue a course that falls into "stalker" mode, making him, in the big picture, little better than the "Kurt" character he loathes...and fears. It is that aspect of the story that is the biggest failure of the film—one sees Hogancamp's motivations, but he has no real conflict other than with the differences between his fantasy reality and his true reality, essentially creating drama in his real life to match his fantasies, not unlike a lovesick and clueless suitor. If one has any sympathy for her, Carell's Hogancamp appears dangerous and unsympathetic, which tests the audience's resolve. Ultimately, the "Nicol" character serves no good purpose other than as an excuse for some exposition that gives us a little more explanation of what's going on in Hogancamp's head besides doll-fights.

I haven't seen Marwencol (the trailer is below), but I'm sensing that, without the dizzying, dizzy doll-sequences, the documentary gives more insight into his mind-set than including all the sequences with play-sets.

For a movie to truly work, it needs to communicate below the surface-level. In the case of Welcome to Marwen, it does not show us what it's like to walk around in somebody's army-boots...or fashionable pumps.

The Heroes of Marwen—the fantasy versions

* This top image is the one I saw posted on Facebook that was posted as a meme.

** sarcasm alert

*** For those familiar with the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, you will recognize the name "Dejah Thoris" as belonging to the Princess of Mars from Burroughs' "Barsoom" stories.