25 Years Ago This Month: Biloxi Blues Short Cut Movie Review

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues picks up several years after his Brighton Beach Memoirs left off. Eugene Jerome (Matthew Broderick) is now finished with high school and headed for Army basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi, ahead of deployment to the War in the Pacific. His comrades in training include a muscle head and obnoxious jerk named Wykowski (Matt Mulhern); a New York intellectual, Arnold Epstein (Corey Parker); a dim-witted loud mouth, Selridge (Markus Flanagan); and a sort of nervous young soldier lacking in confidence (Casey Siemaszko).

Eugene goes through another coming-of-age tale, this time learning about the rigors of dealing with different personalities and backgrounds in a high stress environment, losing his virginity, and falling love (with the sweet and lovely Daisy, played by the equally sweet Penelope Ann Miller). Eugene, with his never-ending wisecracks, and Epstein, with his stubborn adherence to fairness, justice, and logic and refusal to go along with the army’s code of following orders, are foils for their drill instructor, Sgt. Toomey. In Christopher Walken, director Mike Nichols found the perfect actor to portray the soft-spoken, but menacing Toomey. He doesn’t get results by braying orders and insults a la Sgt Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, but by constantly undermining the appearance that humor and laughter will save these boys. His methods seem unorthodox from an outsider’s perspective, but barring a final act of madness he seems entirely reasonable as a man charged with training boys for war. I believe this was my first exposure to Walken and in a way it’s the quintessential Walken role and undertaken long before he became an object of parody and imitation.

Biloxi Blues works better as a movie than its predecessor thanks to Nichols’ direction. His vast experience in both film and stage means he’s able to make Simon’s screenplay more open while also working well with the actors to breathe fresh life into the dialogue. It never really feels like it was written with a live audience in mind.

Chaplin Movie Review

The problem that plagues most biographical films is the way they try to encompass far too much. In my experience, the best films about historical figures have honed their stories to focus on one period in their lives or on one particular aspect. It’s nearly impossible to depict an accurate sense of a person’s life in the space of a feature film. How do you distill what usually fills several hundred pages of printed words to a story that fits into so short a time span? Richard Attenborough tried it with Gandhi and though the result is a well-regarded film, it is also remembered by most people (myself included) as more than a bit boring. Several of Attenborough’s films focus on real historical figures, but his next straight biographical film was Chaplin in 1992.

The Artist Movie Review

They just don’t make ‘em like they used to. So goes the lament of the traditionalist, the old curmudgeon, the aging aficionado who, like me, thinks the state of commercial filmmaking these days is severely lacking in skilled craftsmen to write a screenplay and cut together a coherent film. Perhaps that’s why French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius’s silent drama The Artist has garnered so much attention and accolades. It’s not just a film shot without dialogue in a contemporary style. It’s a complete throwback to classical storytelling techniques used from the 20’s through the 50’s.