lufts Reviews

Nuremberg (2000)

Surprised at the lack of sophistication in many reviews

[8/10 · 25 March 2014]

Writing in 2014 and having the benefit of reading all of the other reviews, as well as being a student of both the war, and the trials, I'm somewhat fascinated by how much others seem to miss about the actual trials, the war, and the film. First, considering the length of the the FIRST part of the Nuremburg trials (which went on long after this first portion, led mostly by General Telford Taylor who would go on to teach law at Columbia Law School, and whose magnum opus "Munich: The Price of Peace" is considered the standard bearer for history of that precursor to the war), condensing it into a 3 hour miniseries, the producers did a nice job, particularly in Brian Cox's portrayal of Herman Goerring.

However, what is missed is that part of Goerring arrogance during his direct examination, had to do with his slow, and painful recovery from both his morphine addiction, and his gross obesity.

By the end of the war, as mentioned by Goerring's wife in the film, the former Reichmarshall, had been stripped of his title and in fact, an SS squad had been sent to kill him.

Goerring had become a bumbling, bloated drug addict, incapable of performing almost any function.

And to Colonel Andrus credit, he made sure that Goerring got healthy before the trial.

Yet, it was just that, and Goerring's return to the former WWI flying ace status (Goerring replaced the Red Baron as Germany's greatest combat pilot during that war) that helped lead to his confrontation with Jackson.

As has been mentioned here, despite Alec Baldwin needing to "redeem" Jackson, in fact, there was really no redemption.

The transcripts of the trial are available to all, and Jackson's examination of Goerring was an unmitigated disaster, prosecutorially.

It was only Maxwell-Fyfe's brilliant cross that saved the day and it is a legal moment still studied by prosecutors to this day.

The so called affair between Jackson and the Jill Hennesy character is also silly.

As a final point, the unquestioned view of Albert Speer as remorseful is questionable at best.

One gets the impression from his "Inside the Third Reich" that it is likely that Speer was simply looking out for himself, and, having served his sentence, left Spandau and became a successful raconteur.

However, Speer was arguably the most important man in the Reich by the end of the war, and in fact, had made the Reich and the war effort even more efficient at the end, than the beginning. He was a long term member of the Nazi party (from 1931), and being in charge of everything in Germany, including the trains, which he claimed at the trial to not know were being used to transport death camp victims, his claim of not knowing rang very hollow.

The "conflict" between Speer and Goerring was also overplayed. Speer looked at Goerring still as the corpulent drug addict, while he was the regal Nazi. Tall, good looking and oh so efficient.

As for trying to kill Hitler, Speer himself said that he never actually meant to, and it was merely puffery.

Shoah (1985)

Other reviewers missed the point

[10/10 · 20 December 2013]

I will leave the technical details of this devastating film to the description on the title page and the other reviewers, but what amazes me is how completely the other reviewers have missed the entire point of Lanzmann's epic.

A bit of context is critical. Despite what we now know about the Holocaust, the Shoah, in the 1980's things were quite different. For the first 2 decades after the end of the war and the earliest of the Nuremberg trials, the German death factories and their hideous results were little talked about.

The allies were busy recruiting ex Nazis either for their rocket or military programs, intelligence agencies, etc, and the survivors were first living in relocation camps all over Europe and then trying simply to rebuild their lives and put their personal tragedies behind them.

And then came the Eichmann trial in Israel, which shocked the world, and was really the first time that survivors started to talk. (In fact, David Ben Gurion specifically wanted the trial for exactly that reason. He knew it needed to be talked about so that the new generation would learn about what had happened).

Lanzmann began his work on the film not that long after that trial, and it was in response to the excuse that Eichmann used. "I was just following orders" and to the prevailing attitude about who and what was responsible for the world's first scientifically planned, and methodically executed genocide.

The common thread through from then and into the 1980's was that most of the German, Polish, Czech, Ukranian, etc, people were innocent victims of the minority of the Germans that were fanatical Nazis and thus were absolved of responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust.

Now, Dwight Eisenhower knew this to be false, which is why he ordered the townspeople surrounding the German camps to be paraded through them by the allied troops and to bury, individually, the victims that had not been incinerated.

Lanzman was really the first scholar, and I use that term intentionally, because Shoah is nothing if not a scholarly work, to begin the process of exploding this myth.

The complicity of most of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe in this horrid stain on human history was most famously exposed in Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (released 12 years after "Shoah")which investigates the endemic antisemitism throughout this part of Europe and how Hitler's rantings were descended upon a more than willing audience.

And THAT is Lanzmann's brilliance. Through their own words, he demonstrates clearly that not only were those in the areas of these camps fully aware of what was happening, but fully complicit in it. And more frightening is that even knowing what happened, and the unimaginable results, their attitudes, in many cases have not changed.

With each interview, and each admission, Lanzmann slowly breaks down the myth of the innocent countryside population. "We didn't know" unfolds until "We knew, and we were involved" is the obvious answer.

Lanzmann's work is not only a great film, but it is really a must see in the true definition of that word.

Client 9 (2010)

A whitewash of a true hypocrite

[1/10 · 7 July 2011]

If I could give this a zero, I would. I was a fan of Spitzer's early in his purported campaign against Wall Street. As a New Yorker, I had followed his silk purse career from the beginning.

What the writer director does here is imply, use innuendo and ultimately avoid the bottom line single issue. Eliot Spitzer hired prostitutes and flew them all over the country, nay, the world, all the while prosecuting the same behavior in others. Worse, he was hiring young women, the same age as his own daughters. A truly sleazy individual.

But it goes much farther than that. It totally ignores all of the financial shenanigans of Eliot and his father, which would have derailed any national run for office. His father, one of the largest real estate developers in NY, gifted Eliot numerous apartments which provided most of his multimillion dollar income. His father even paid the gift tax on it.

Bernard also loaned Spitzer's campaigns millions of dollars, $5Million +, and worse, made enormous donations to the campaigns of those who were his son's "allies".

That is almost unimportant next to the real issues. Spitzer's supposed campaign against Wall Street. In most of the cases that he made sure to hold press conferences when issuing subpoenas, he ended up settling for virtually nothing, or never even pursuing in court.

Worse, he lost the most high profile prosecutions he pursued, including the one showcased in the movie against Dick Grasso of the NYSE (never mentioned in the movie that Grasso was vindicated in Federal Court) and was shown to have been nothing more than a personally vindictive, wildly undisciplined attorney general.

By his own admission in the film, again, brushed over by the filmmaker, he admits to telephone calls to the people he was pursuing telling them they were 'dead' or going to be 'steamrolled' or "at war". What kind of prosecutor does such things? Ultimately, the director through innuendo and editing, implies that there was a conspiracy to bring Spitzer down. He even uses pro Spitzer talking heads to imply that Spitzer would be the only "John" to be prosecuted under the Mann Act (I guess he never heard of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson) and then immediately quickly brushes past the fact that Spitzer, in fact, was NOT prosecuted. He then again uses a talking head to claim that the entire investigation was a set up simply to leak Spitzer's involvement with the Emperor's Club prostitution service to the NY Times. Huh? The most liberal newspaper in the country, which almost singlehandedly had made his career was now the demon of his destruction? What he completely ignores are the simple facts of the case. There was not a single notice of an illegal transaction noticed by the Feds, but many transactions designed to specifically skirt the federal law that requires ANY cash transaction of $10K or more to be reported (some reports said dozens of such transactions). Spitzer repeatedly made transactions of $5K at a time to pay his $10K/day hooker. The law that was designed primarily to ensnare money launderers as a result of the cocaine wars of the 1980's is what caught him.

The size of the this ring, whose owners were sent to federal prison, is demonstrated by the fact that when they were arrested in their apartment, they had more than $1 Million in cash in a safe in their bedroom. This was no small time hooker service, but a major international escort service which included members of the royal family as clients - oh yeah, I guess since THAT came out, it wasn't really an attack just on Spitzer - another fact noted, and whitewashed by the director.

Did Spitzer make enemies? Of course. But the idea that Hank Greenberg or Ken Langone brought him down is not only foolish, it's insulting. Were they the ones hiring the hookers? The director also compares Spitzer to fallen pols like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich and others who engaged in extramarital affairs. As bad as they were, they were NOT committing crimes and certainly NOT at the same time they were specifically empowered to prosecute the very crimes they were committing.

That Spitzer has any credibility is a sad reflection of the current state of the body politic.

Spitzer is a brilliant individual with an extreme case of narcissistic personality disorder.

Had the filmmaker used the forum to dissect the hubris that ultimately brings down so many of these types, he might have added to the conversation.

Instead, this film looks like it was bankrolled, as Eliot's whole career was, by his father.

Criminal Minds: Mosley Lane (2010) Season 5, Episode 16

Oddly weak episode

[3/10 · 21 March 2011]

I'm a huge fan of the series, but the acting, from normally fine performers here was odd to say the least. The emotions seemed to have no relation to the script or situations, and would change at the drop of a hat, but not in the way one would expect. Just flat recitation of lines. Particularly the Brooke Smith character who seemed not particularly upset at her daughter's disappearance, and not at all disturbed by her husband's blame.

Sadly, I have to lay the blame on Gubler's direction. He may be just a bit young and inexperienced at this point to direct effectively.

Just as problematic was that there was absolutely no exploration of the cause of the kidnapping, or the psychology of the "unsubs", both the things that set CM apart from the typical crime drama. This is just one of the indications of a particularly weak script for this normally powerful show.