Anonymous_Maxine

There is a scene early in Silent Night that I thought was indicative of a profoundly cheesy war film that was to follow. A couple American soldiers are passing through a snowy wood when they come across a young German boy. One soldier calls the kid "my friend," and the kid mutters a well-rehearsed line about how they are not friends and never will be, at which point the American soldier gives him a heartwarming speech about how the radio has been deceiving them, and that they are not his enemy, Hitler is. This is a level of preposterous cheesiness that almost reaches propaganda, but even though a German country woman talks some American and German soldiers into disarming and spending some quality time together, it turns out to be a lot better than I expected.

Linda Hamilton plays Elisabeth Vincken, a German widow who lost one son and probably her husband (he's only a cook but has been missing for months), and is now living in a small cabin in the woods with her 12-year-old son Fritz, who she is protecting from compulsory military service. Two American and two German soldiers have a confrontation just outside her cabin, and she demands that they leave their weapons outside if they want to take shelter in her home.

My initial reaction was that I was not going to be able to tolerate Linda Hamilton speaking German (followed by her German accent, after they switched to English), but the movie deals with many of the difficult realities of war, despite a feeling of being unrealistic. My understanding, however, is that it's based on a true story (which has already been brought to the screen multiple times), but either way, it deals with the fact that wars are fought by guys on both sides that just want to survive and go home safely to their families.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie shows the soldiers on both sides compiling all the food they have on them in preparation for their first meal together. It's a perfect way to humanize a bunch of guys with guns, especially when one of the German soldiers has a small package of cookies that his wife made him. A doting wife baking cookies is not exactly the kind of image that Hollywood has taught us to associate with the soldiers of Nazi Germany, but it is undeniably true.

Essentially the movie is the story of a small group of "enemies" in World War II who decided to make a temporary truce with each other in honor of Christmas Day. This is a premise fraught with potential pitfalls, but by staying away from confectionery clichés it manages to come across as a disarming analysis of the politicians that create wars and the young men that fight them.

I will readily admit that I expected something completely different from what I got when I watched Naked Weapon. It has all the ingredients, including the title, of your standard t&a action flick, a curious subgenre that I am not completely averse to, although my girlfriend picked out the movie so I thought I was about to enjoy a guilt-free 90 minutes or so of relentlessly gratuitous nudity. Nope! Surprisingly enough, the movie has almost no nudity at all and makes an honest effort to pass on an honest and moving story.

That second part is an almost total failure, of course, but I give them points for effort. It's one of those rare movies where the tagline tells you almost everything you need to know about the movie – they seduce you before they kill you!

Yeah, whatever. That's just a promise for the endless nudity and sex scenes that aren't in the movie, and it actually does the movie a disservice by promising nothing but empty t&a while the movie itself is really trying to tell a good story. Whether or not the story is any good is up to you to decide, but I'm here to warn you that it's essentially a ripoff of Battle Royale, except it's not good.

A cold-blooded woman named Madame M kidnaps 40 preteen girls and takes them to an island at an undisclosed location in the middle of the ocean. They are offered a polite invitation to leave if they're unhappy upon their arrival, with the small detail that they are machine-gunned down on their way back to the helicopter. Those that remain spend the next 6 years of their lives going through a brutal boot-camp designed to turn them into deadly, hottie assassins.

You see, I can say hottie about a lot of 12-year-old girls here because by the time any of them are hot they're at least 6 years older than 12 and have killed all of the rest of the girls, usually with their bare hands, and really, what's hotter than chicks killing each other?

Well, your answer to that question will basically predict your opinion of the movie. If you would have no problem watching a bunch of puberty-bound girls being trained how to be sexy and how to be deadly at the same time, then this thing is for you. Personally I didn't mind it too much. I really wish they would have toned down the catastrophically bad acting and sporadic avalanches of cheese, but for a movie that attempts to give us such a belligerently outlandish premise as this and maintain a straight face, you have to give it at least some recognition. Good luck keeping a straight face yourself, though

Pretty interesting documentary about a film that, despite being beautifully photographed, is intolerably slow and plodding and ultimately profoundly uninteresting. I have never really been moved to call myself a fan of Barry Sonnenfeld's work, although his skill as a cinematographer certainly show through in his films and this short documentary gives him a great opportunity to make some interesting points about why he uses certain cameras and lenses and the different effects that they have. He gives us some good details about his involvement with the Coen brothers at the outset of their career and about his collaboration with them on their first three films. You can skip the last two minutes or so of this little documentary, however, which is the obligatory "working with these guys was the greatest thing that has ever happened to any human being in the history of mankind" nonsense, but otherwise an interesting look into the style of Barry Sonnenfeld.