Word: pearls
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...Hollywood's great rumors--perhaps the only one that doesn't end with the words "...is gay!"--was put to rest this week when director JOHN FRANKENHEIMER said he is not the biological father of Pearl Harbor director MICHAEL BAY. There is, however, something behind the tale. Bay was adopted in 1965, and Frankenheimer told the Los Angeles Times that he indeed had a one-night stand with Bay's birth mother in the early '60s. A few years later, when she threatened to name him as the father of her child, Frankenheimer paid the woman $7,500 to keep...
...Pearl Harbor was, among other things, the first mass martyrdom of what we've come to know as the Greatest Generation: 2,403 people died there--with awful suddenness. The first thing to understand is that this was just a drop in the cauldron that was World War II, which, globally, cost at least 50 million lives. We Americans lost more men in our victories--more than 6,000 at Iwo Jima, for example, 12,000 at Okinawa--than we did in that defeat. This is one of the many things you won't learn from the blockbuster movie...
...principally, but not exclusively, with its love story. The movie's makers--producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Michael Bay and writer Randall Wallace--looked unashamedly at Titanic and found its heated romance the perfect device to narrow the distance between a great historical happening and today's essentially antihistorical audience. Pearl Harbor thus spends a lot of time with Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), boyhood pals who grow up to be hot pilots falling in love with the same woman, a Navy nurse named Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale). Rafe is first in line, but when he goes...
...Cuba Gooding Jr. playing a real historical figure, Dorie Miller, for us to root for. Miller was a cook who, though untrained, manned a gun and may have shot down one or two Japanese planes. But his character is merely sketched into the narrative, and the entire assault on Pearl has a curiously abstract air about it. The bodies fly spectacularly when the Arizona is hit, but we don't know, thus care about, the victims...
...possible this is a story you can't tell from the bottom up. Maybe the real Pearl Harbor tragedy took place in Tokyo and Washington--bunches of old guys sitting around talking erroneous geopolitics. They play small roles here, and you can't expect anyone to make a big-time movie about their murmured miscalculations. You do, however, have a right to the kind of high, passionate drama that's missing from this movie...