Arts of War on the Web

The new big Hollywood film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, has a minor Vietnam War theme.  The movie spin out a based-on-a-true (if extremely odd) story of military intelligence gone two steps over the line. Said theme plays out in the person of Vietnam veteran Bill Django, played by the always-good Jeff Bridges, who in the two decades after his service in the war, has morphed into a New Age hippie type.

He comes up with a goofy intelligence manual (partially under the influence of hallucinogens) that the Army decides to adopt.  It’s based on his hush-hush Nam assignment as the leader of an experimental unit called The New Earth Army.

“We must be the first superpower to have super powers,” Django, notes, and then the excellent ensemble, led by George Clooney (above, staring at a goat) Ewan McGregor, Bridges and Kevin Spacey, have fun with the Army’s version of Jedi “warrior monks.”

The reviews were generally positive. The New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis, for example, called the movie “likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy.”

Oliver (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, et al.) Stone is at work on his latest film, a sequel to his first post-Platoon movie, Wall Street, which came out late in 1987. That movie, in which Michael Douglas starred as the unscrupulous wheeler-dealer Gordon Gekko, won critical and popular acclaim, and a Best Actor Oscar for Douglas. Charlie Sheen, who had the lead in Platoon, starred opposite Douglas as a young, hungry stockbroker.

Douglas will reprise his role in the new movie, which Stone says will try to capture the greedy Wall Street culture prior to the most recent economic unpleasantness, as the first film did with that mid-eighties Wall Street milieu.

“When Gekko comes out of prison in the beginning of this movie, he essentially has to redefine himself, redefine his character,” Stone said in a Sept. 9 The New York Times interview. “He’s looking for that second chance.” The on-line component of the NYT article includes a video of Stone talking about the films.

When the prime-time Emmy award nominations were announced this morning, HBO led the league, with 99. No. 2 NBC had 67. Among the 99 are ten nominations for the sterling original film, Taking Chance, which VVA will screen twice at the 14th National Convention in Louisville.

The nominations include Outstanding Made for Television Movie; Outstanding Lead Actor in a Mini Series or a Movie (Kevin Bacon as Mike Strobl); Outstanding Directing (Ross Katz); and Outstanding Writing (Strobl and Katz). The Emmys will air September 20 on CBS from the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles.

Mike Strobl will be honored by VVA with the President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the Convention’s Saturday night banquet. Strobl, HBO CEO Bill Nelson (a VVA member) and John Phelps (Chance Phelps’ father) will be on hand for the Saturday afternoon screeningin Louisville.

The highly praised HBO film Taking Chance, which was first aired on February 19, will be released on DVD on May 12. If you didn’t catch this beautifully made, powerfully acted film about a 19-year-old Marine’s final journey home from the war in Iraq, mark your calendar and check it out.

VVA will honor HBO and screenwriter Mike Strobl (above) at the National Convention in Louisville at the Saturday night Awards Banquet. We also will have two screenings of the film for Convention delegates and guests, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon.

The film, starring Kevin Bacon, tells the moving story of the journey that Marine Lt. Col. Strobl underwent after he volunteered to escort the body of 19-year-old Chance Phelps from Dover Air Force Base to Phelps’ hometown of Dubois, Wyoming. Strobl, a Persian Gulf War I veteran now retired from the Marine Corps, co-wrote the screenplay, along with the film’s director and executive producer Ross Katz in his first directorial effort.

“I was wondering about Chance Phelps,” Strobl noted in his journal as he waited to begin the work of escorting the remains. “I didn’t know anything about him; not even what he looked like. I wondered about his family and what it would be like to meet them. I did pushups in my room until I couldn’t do any more.”

What Strobl found on this journey—and what the film shows beautifully—was an outpouring of respect, tinged with sadness, from virtually everyone he encountered along the way: baggage handlers at airports, fellow commercial plane passengers, airline counter personnel, funeral home employees and, above all, the military personnel who took charge of Chance Phelps’ body in Iraq, transported it to Dover, and prepared it for burial.

The DVD is available at all the usual rental outlets and for purchase on line, including through HBO.

The University of Iowa’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the University’s Veterans Center, is offering Identity and Social Issues: Wounded Warriors: Veterans in Literature and Film, a class this summer taught by creative nonfiction instructor Stephen A Kuusisto. The class runs from June 9 to July 31 and meets twice a week on the Iowa City campus.

“Disability has always been a difficult subject in literature and film,” the course description says. “Disabled characters often challenge cultural ideas of ‘normalcy’ while they also complicate the symbolism of the ‘heroic’ body. This course explores the contradictions in the representations of disability in literature and film by focusing on the experiences of veterans with disabilities.

Specifically we will analyze representations of veterans with disabilities in literature and film and seek to understand the wounded body in its political, social, and cultural contexts. Additionally we will explore how literature both reflects and distorts the experiences of returning veterans.”

The films and books the course cover will include several dealing with the Vietnam War, such as Ron Kovic’s primal scream of a memoir, Born on the Fourth of July and the accompanying film by Oliver Stone, and The Deer Hunter (above). It also includes the great post-WWII film the Best Years of our Lives, as well as selections from the writings of Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Studs Terkel, and Norman Mailer.

For info, email stephen-kuusisto@uiowa.edu or john-mikelson@uiowa.edu, go to www.uiowa.edu/~uiva ohn D. Mikelson or call 319-384-2020.

When a big Hollywood movie with big Hollywood stars goes straight to video, it usually is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong. That’s what I thought when I heard that the new Tommy Lee Jones film, In the Electric Mist, never made it to the theaters and went right into the video stores (and Netflix).

The movie is based on the great James Lee Burke detective thriller In the Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead, in which his Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux, solves a couple of grisly murders and overcomes his own Vietnam-War induced flashbacks that feature dead Confederate soldiers arising from the Louisiana swamps to have conversations with him about life and death and war.

I just watched the video. The movie was–surprise to me!–terrific. Tommy Lee Jones was great as he usually is, as the haunted but honorable and morally upright Dave. The french director Bertrand Tavernier got southern Louisiana beautifully on film. The pictures were as evocative as Burke’s always great writing. The plot hummed along.

The other actors (including John Goodman doing a great bad guy, Julie “Baby Feet” Balboni; Mary Steenburgen as Dave’s paitent, put-upon wife Bootsie; Justina Machado–best known for her role as Rico’s wife on Six Feet Under–as FBI agent Rosie Gomez; and the always-reliable Ned Beatty as Twinky LeMoyne) were all but perfect.

The plot is essentially the same as the book’s, but moved up from the early ’90s to the present day, or at least post-Katrina. Dave gets sucked into a nerve-rattling investigation of a dead prostitute, which leads to re-opening the case of the murder of a prisoner that he happened to witness three decades earlier. Dave, as he is wont to do, takes the law into his own hands (above) once or twice. He has flashbacks, including several talks with Confederate Army Gen. John Bell Hood, played eerily well by Levon Helm, best known as the drummer in The Band.

Dave’s Vietnam War service is an important part of the novel. It is not mentioned in the film, which is too bad. It could have further flushed out his character. The only hint is when Helm addresses Dave as “lieutenant” a couple of times.

HBO, whose Chairman and CEO Bill Nelson served a tour of duty as an infantryman in Vietnam (and is a member of Vietnam Veterans of America), has long had a special affinity for America’s veterans. The pay TV giant has gone the extra yard countless times to benefit those who have fought for our country, most often sponsoring screenings, receptions and other top-notch events for veterans at its state-of-the-art headquarters in New York.

A case in point: HBO held several screenings and receptions for veterans in conjunction with its brilliant new film, Taking Chance. That included a screening February 12 at the HBO building on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Among those on hand: the President of HBO Films Len Amato, the actor Kevin Bacon (who stars in Taking Chance), Bill Nelson, retired Marine Lt. Col. Michael Strobl (who co-wrote the screenplay based on his experiences escorting the body of Chance Phelps from Dover, Delaware, to his home in Wyoming), and the actor Tony Sirico (best known as Paulie in The Sopranos)

Among the veterans in attendance were Board members of New York City’s Friends of Vietnam Veteran’s Plaza, the organization that supports the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The guest list also included Gretchen Mack (Chance Phelps’ mother), and John Phelps (Chance’s father), himself a Vietnam veteran.

The novelist James Lee Burke introduced his troubled Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux in In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (1993), a terrific novel in which Dave’s horrendous experiences in the Vietnam War revisit him in unsettling ways.

The film version, directed by Bertrand Tavernier, was scheduled to be released last year. That didn’t happen for whatever reason and the film, starring the great Tommy Lee Jones as Dave and the great John Goodman as ultra bad guy “Baby Feet” Balboni” is just out on video. We’ll have a review just as soon as it arrives from Netflix.

The moving HBO film Taking Chance, which will debut on Saturday, February 19, is a beautifully made, powerfully acted story about a 19-year-old Marine’s final journey home from the war in Iraq. With this elegiac effort, HBO, the pay cable giant, continues its long record of producing the highest-quality TV drama dealing with the nation’s wars, from WWII (Band of Brothers), through the Vietnam War (Dear America, Vietnam War Stories), and to today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Taking Chance is based on “actual events,” as they say in movieland. In this case, the events are the death of 19-year-old Marine Chance Phelps in Iraq in 2004 and the journey that Marine Lt. Col. Mike Strobl underwent after he volunteered to escort the body from Dover Air Force Base to Phelps’ hometown of Dubois, Wyoming. Strobl’s journal of that journey, which he posted on line, is the heart of the film.

Strobl, a Persian Gulf War I veteran now retired from the Marine Corps, co-wrote the screenplay, along with the film’s director and executive producer Ross Katz in his first directorial effort. Katz, who was born in 1971, produced the big Hollywood movies Marie Antoinette and Lost in Translation. He does a smashing job with Taking Chance.

Chance Phelps died in March 2004, a month after he had arrived in Iraq. He “was wearing his Saint Christopher medal when he was killed on Good Friday,” Strobl’s journal begins. “Eight days later, I handed the medallion to his mother. I didn’t know Chance before he died. Today, I miss him.”

Chance Phelps was killed after volunteering to man a .50-caliber machine gun in the turret of the leading vehicle in a convoy. “The convoy came under intense fire but Chance stayed true to his post and returned fire with the big gun, covering the rest of the convoy, until he was fatally wounded.” Strobl wrote. “I was wondering about Chance Phelps,” Strobl noted in his journal as he waited to begin the work of escorting the remains. “I didn’t know anything about him; not even what he looked like. I wondered about his family and what it would be like to meet them. I did pushups in my room until I couldn’t do any more.”

What Strobl found on this journey—and what the film shows beautifully—was an outpouring of respect, tinged with sadness, from virtually everyone he encountered along the way: baggage handlers at airports, fellow commercial plane passengers, airline counter personnel, funeral home employees and, above all, the military personnel who took charge of Chance Phelps’ body in Iraq, transported it to Dover, and prepared it for burial.

Fifty-year-old Kevin Bacon does an exceptional job portraying Strobl. Bacon is every ounce the dedicated, thoughtful Marine with strong convictions about his place in the Marine Corps, about the Iraq war. and about the young man whose remains he is entrusted with. “I felt like this was a story that needs to be told,” Bacon said in a recent interview. “It’s not just about Iraq, but it’s about Vietnam and Korea and World War II. It’s really a story about war, and it’s told from a really unique perspective.”

The Vietnam War connection is present in the figure of John Phelps (played pitch perfectly by the veteran character actor Tom Wopat), Chance’s father, who appears in the last part of the film, along with the rest of his family in a stirring scene in which Bacon/Strobl delivers the body and Chance’s personal effects. It’s the most moving part of a very moving movie.

This is a movie, by the way, that transcends politics. It is about the human cost of war. It is about the troops. It is not pro or anti-Iraq War. It transcends the individual story of Chance Phelps to tell a universal one that involves anyone who has died in the service of his or her country.

For tons of info and to see a trailer, go to the extensive web site HBO has set up to spread the word.

The HBO movie, Taking Chance, will be shown on the pay cable giant for the first time on Saturday, February 21. It promises to be a first-rate, moving film. The movie, starring Kevin Bacon (above), is based on the true story of what happened to LTC Michael Strobl (Bacon), an Iraq War I veteran with 17 years in the Marine Corps, who volunteered in 2004 to escort the body of 19-year-old USMC Lance Corporal Chance Phelps, who had been killed in Al Anbar Province in Iraq, to his hometown in Wyoming.

The film focuses on the amazing, spontaneous outpouring of support and respect for young Chance Phelps that Stobl encountered.  It is directed by Ross Katz (who produced the film Lost in Translation). Strobl wrote the screenplay, along with Katz, and based it on his personal journal. The film has the strong support of Chance Phelps’ parents, John Phelps and Gretchen Mack.

John Phelps is a Vietnam veteran and an accomplished Wyoming artist. His latest oil painting was featured on the cover of the September/October issue of The VVA Veteran. For more info on the HBO film, including a video trailer, go to http://www.hbo.com/films/takingchance/