Friday, February 07, 2014
The Monuments Men
On paper this looks like a great movie. Great cast, great
true story. Home run for all involved. But the script is dull! After some
boring narration about the importance of protecting art, the first half of the
movie is not about that. It’s all about war being “hell”, which is a perfectly
valid theme for any movie OTHER than this one. The theme of this movie is
supposed to be “save the art.” So, finally, in the second half, the monuments
men start to save the art. Some of the scenes are fun. They seem clipped out of
an episode of Hogan’s Heroes, i.e. a bunch of tough guys standing around a map,
planning and scheming, guessing where the Nazis would strike next. Good stuff.
But that nagging question of, “What the fuck was going on in the first half of
this movie?” never really goes away. So the script by Clooney and Heslov is
sloppy and clunky which is too bad because this could have been really good.
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My problem with the first part of the movie is that none of the characters are introduced. We know nothing about them, so we end up basically watching Bill Murray and John Goodman wander through Europe instead of actual characters.
ReplyDeleteAnd if any of them actually have a passion for art... well I must have missed that part of the movie. They basically walk through the movie making a few quips, listen to the same Clooney speech three times and then wander into a salt mine here and there.
And Matt Damon... he apparently goes behind enemy lines, undercover, so that he can get into Paris to meet with a contact there. But he takes so long, the city has already been liberated and he can fly right into the middle of Paris in a plane!. why did they waste time with those scenes with the resistance and instead just cut to him driving into the city in a jeep?
Bleh