Bruckheimer at War: Two Takes on Pearl Harbor

Film Reviews | Regular Feature movies. It's sort of epic in scale hopefully, sort of classic in its scope, and yet it's dumb guys cutting up and acting stupid" (http:/ /studio.go.com/movies/obrother/). "Sing in me, Muse, and through / me tell the story of that man / skilled in all ways of contending." So begins The Odyssey and so begins O Brother, Where Art Thou? Or as in the words of the cowboy in The Big Lebowski, "Sometimes there's a man for his time and place." It might be said that these expressions apply as well to the Coen brothers as they do to any other filmmaker. If the Coen brothers have been accused ofbeing too often derivative in their films, it might pay to stand back and readjust our perspective on them not only as filmmakers, but also as mythmakers. If we can see their filmmaking as an attempt to raise awareness ofAmerican mythology, then the argument can be made that their films are no more derivative than is Aeschylus's Agamemnon, which indeed is derivative butjustifiably so. Certainly cinemahas become a major part oftheAmerican sense of identity, and in a country where people are so often so divided, commonality can often be found around the utterance of a line like "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." The Coens have repeatedly demonstrated their understanding ofthis, that our movies are a part of who we are as Americans, at least as much as The Odyssey and its underlying myths were a part of another long extinct, but still much celebrated culture. The movies abide, and so too do the Coen brothers. Marc Oxoby University of Nevada, Reno Oxoby@aol.com Bruckheimer at War: Two Takes on Pearl Harbor Jerry Bruckheimer's Pearl Harbor is a Mr. Creosote of a movie, stuffed so full ofstorylines and scenes from previous big budget features that it might explode. It's also a celebration of Bruckheimer's cinematic oeuvre. PearlHarboris the story oftwo fighterpilots, Rafe (heartthrob Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett). Lifelong buddies , they are the best pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Rafe is a cocky daredevil, Danny the levelheaded sidekick who is sort of willingly dragged into Rafe's aerial escapades. A daredevil pilot and his trusty sidekick? Sounds like Bruckheimer's 1986 hit Top Gun. It is, but with startling differences. For example, Rafe and Danny fly prop fighters, while Top Gun's pilots flyjet fighters. When Rafe and Danny buzz the flight tower, they earn an admiring reprimand from their commander, Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin), who tells them, "Those $45,000 planes aren't for your amusement!" After Maverick (heart-throb Tom Cruise) and his Top Gun buddy Goose, (Anthony Edwards) buzz the tower, their commander admiringly reprimands them: "You don't own thatplane, the taxpayers do!" Tragedy ensues in PearlHarbor when Rafe crash lands in China and Danny is gunned down protecting him, causing guilty feelings for Rafe. In Top Gun, Goose ejects, hits his head and dies, all due to an error by Maverick , who feels guilty. In Top Gun, Maverick's buddy is named "Goose" and there is another character in the film who sports a cowboy hat, while in Pearl Harbor Bruckheimer has created a cowboy-hat-wearing character named "Gooz." Pearl Harbor is more than just a Top Gun rip-off though. It is also a Titanic rip-off that pays homage to Bruckheimer's Armageddon. Like Titanic, the historical narrative is subsumed by a banal love story, and we see ships keeling over with sailors desperately fighting gravity to hang on. Like Armageddon, (in which we see another subtle Bruckheimer distinction - this time Affleck plays a brash young oil rigger turned astronaut), Pearl Harbor features a love triangle in which only a heroic death can unite Affleck with his beloved. In Armageddon, it is the death of his beloved's father, whose last act is apologizing for how he had treated Affleck, and giving him a father's blessing to take his daughter's hand; in Pearl Harbor, it is Danny who must die, and he devotes his last minutes to apologizing for impregnating Affleck...