Keeping a webpage up-to-date is a labor of love (or perhaps an indication of excess time on one's hands), and I can't say that I'm overly enamored with the whole thing. Still, it's fun to check in once in a while and mess with things, just on the off chance someone might be paying attention. Blog? I don' need no steenkin' blog!

This whole site is my blog, is it not?

Also, I write sonnets.

Meanwhile, for your amusement....

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
a review by Geoff Burkman

In 1990 my wife and I had the opportunity to vacation in Honolulu, Hawaii; I hadn't been there for 25 years---my wife had never been. As many do, we visited the Arizona Memorial, beneath which rest the sea-bleached bones of ship and crew. As I approached the entrance to the Memorial, I paused, and as I looked down into the waters a great and sudden sadness welled up within me. I quietly wept, thankful I was wearing sunglasses so that my distress was concealed. The sense of loss I felt was enormous, and it somewhat bewildered me, since I had no close family who'd died in WWII. My uncle had been with the Navy in the Pacific but never saw actual combat; my father was a hair too young to see active duty. But as I stood above their final resting place, I could only think of the hundreds of men entombed there, and how that fearsome mass killing had been such a terrible waste, and the tears would not stop for some time.

And thus it was I experienced the savagery of Steven Spielberg's latest film, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It is a film about honor and worth, at its core, and is as genuine a salute to the men who have laid down their lives for their country as anyone could ask. Director Spielberg and writer Robert Rodat deliver a ferocious look at the intensity of modern close combat and its effects on its participants, and raise questions for which there are no confident answers, if indeed there are any at all.

The structure of the film, as observed elsewhere, is symmetric, opening and closing in a Normandy military cemetery, where an aging vet and his family visit the grave of a fallen comrade. Book-ended between are two blisteringly enervating combat sequences and a journey through horror and hard questions.

I say the film is about honor, and it is. It's implied in the very title. Spielberg seeks not only to honor the memory of those who fought and died in that last "Great War" by unflinchingly and honestly depicting the living hell so many of those men endured, but desires as well to force his audience to examine itself, to raise its own questions of integrity and honor, duty and obligation, and to look within itself for the awful meaning of life and death.

He has succeeded.

What else is an act of saving someone else if not an act of honor? And in the process of doing so, the most difficult of all choices must be made--whether to sacrifice one's own life that others might live, or make "the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country." Spielberg's exploration of this dilemma follows several paths and, in keeping with the general tenor of the film--terrifying, numbing, disorienting, and possessed of a great sorrow--he never provides sophistic or glib answers. He leaves us finally at film's end, still reeling from the dense insanity of a desperate bridge defense, with an old man who even after all these passing years is still struggling himself with unanswerable questions.

Much has already been said about the opening Omaha beachhead assault, and I find it pointless to attempt to describe in words the sheer chaos into which Spielberg drops his audience. That is something best experienced for oneself. Let it only be said that one emerges from this howling maelstrom feeling flayed and stripped. It is Spielberg's flaming testament to the brave souls who stormed the beaches of Normandy, and it will leave a scar on your conscience that will not fade for a long time. And, in bits and pieces, torn perhaps from the living flesh of the suffering warriors he depicts, Spielberg begins to pose his questions.

Where is the honor in war? What is the relative value of a man's life? On a personal level, is there anything worth the risk of unimaginable pain and suffering? Other films have tackled these questions in the past, but none have ever had the visceral impact of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. A sniper's duel culminates in a blasted eye socket that makes the audience cringe; a sapper is blown to jelly by a defective "sticky bomb": an excruciating knife fight in which the victor soothes his dying opponent almost crucifies the audience with its grim denouement. Critics have harped on the unrelenting violence as a simple pandering to a jaded, bloodthirsty audience, but they are wrong. Spielberg goes so far beyond the limits of typical cinema "grand guignol" that no one can mistake the overt nature of the message: killing people, especially ones that are trying to kill you, is a brutish, messy business, and no one in their right mind has any desire to engage in the trade any more than they might be compelled.

And in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, we are compelled to bear witness.

After allowing the audience to recuperate from the opening 25-minute barrage via the necessary exposition to define "The Mission," Spielberg and Rodat's story begins to unfold. Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) must lead a squad of his men through a highly fluid battle zone in search of a Private James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon), the sole surviving brother of four. Ryan is somewhere behind enemy lines, a trooper of the scattered 101st Airborne Division, who had dropped the night before the invasion. It is D+3 and Miller has direct orders from General George Marshall to bring Pvt. Ryan out of the raging Normandy battle, to be returned to the safety of his motherland and his family. And so we set off on a trek through hell, a journey that will leave most of its participants dead.

Each man in the squad is an archetype, and a symbol. Pvt.Caparzo (Vin Diesel) is innocence, The Child. Wade, the medic (Giovanni Ribisi), is mercy, The Angel. Mellish, the Jewish soldier (Adam Goldberg) and Jackson, the prayerful sharpshooter (Barry Pepper), embody the twin motivations of retribution and righteousness, the Hammer and the Sword, while Sgt. Horvath (Tom Sizemore) and Capt. Miller serve as the dual engines of strength and courage that keep the small patrol on its course.

These are the ones who perish--each slain in ascending order of significance within the simple tapestry of the plot--the human qualities that are inevitably stripped from a man as he confronts the implacable juggernaut of war. The only ones to survive the charnelhouse are Pvt. Rieben (Ed Burns), the witness Chance ("I was born lucky, Captain!"), and the tag-along interpreter Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies), who serves as the Everyman audience surrogate, the Fool. Ultimately, it is he who must make the crucial moral choice of the film.

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is not a comfortable film experience. Overly sensitive filmgoers will probably be overwhelmed by it; if they can make it through the Omaha beach sequence, they'll do okay. For the rest of us, it is a film worthy of the accolades it has so far received. Personally, I was a bit surprised that it didn't get the Oscar for Best Picture over SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, especially since Spielberg got the nod for Best Director. Such are the whims of the Academy. Never mind. It takes nothing away from the raw power of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.


And another, more recent review: The Dead Walk Again