Erase and Forget. (18.)
Directed by Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
Featuring Bo Gritz, Ted Kotcheff, Tudor Gates, Jo McNeal, Jack Mercer. 90 mins
This documentary about “The toughest American soldier ever,” is packed with treasures, but it pretty much leaves you to sift them out for yourself. Bo Gritz is the country's most decorated Green Beret, a special forces operative who did the dirty work in Vietnam, killed around 400 people and was the inspiration for Rambo, and Col Kurtz, and Hannibal in The A-Team. He ran for President before breaking with the military-industrial complex and founding a community in the Idaho wilderness where he trained up people in counterinsurgency techniques to protect them from their own government.
His is the story of post-war America, both real and fantasized, all its dark and dirty secrets leading to it twisting in on itself. It's a remarkable story but one that, during the 10 years spent trailing him, director Zimmerman seems to have mislaid it. Instead, we are presented with is a great, big jumble of stuff, often fascinating, but very little of which is really explained or connected.
For example, at one point we are introduced to a Mr Tudor Gates, a screenwriter probably most famous for a number of British 70s sex comedies he wrote. He is there because he was involved in a fiction film Gritz starred in, and a film record of a mission Gritz went on in Burma in the late 80s, looking for POWs, in which he met notorious drug trafficker Khun Sa. The discovery that the US administration was part of the drugs trade was key to his break with the military establishment, but quite how he came to be there or exactly what he found isn't explored. Never in a movie have I yearned so much for a voice-over narration, or just a few title cards to fill in some details. You spend so much effort trying to process what is what, and who is who, you tend to miss the larger picture.
Now to be fair, I can see how after ten years of traipsing around various State Fair Hall of Fame Gun and Knife Show, “with jewellery for the ladies,” with not much money and no support team, you'd just go enough, it's done, put it out as it is. It's frustrating but what's there is worth your time.
And the big picture is very big. Gritz's hold on the Hollywood vision of war is immense. OK, I think the A-Team connection is tenuous but he did lead a group of native guerrilla soldiers in Cambodia just like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (“a somewhat bad movie” according to Gritz.) The parallels with Rambo are uncanny: he went searching for POWs in Vietnam, trained up the Afghanistan Mujaheddin and went on a mission to Burma, exactly the same locations of the three sequels. (Some of the film's most illuminating extracts are an interview with Ted Kotcheff, the director of the original Rambo film, First Blood, including its original downbeat ending which was rejected by test audiences.)
Somewhere in his remarkable life, there is a potent story about the symbioses between Hollywood and the military and about how the cynical betrayals of American administrations have bred the rabid mistrust of government that drove the patriotic right to disappear into the wilderness with their guns and ammo in search of honour. The States has always had a ferocious gift for drumming love-of-country into even its most diffident citizens and the film illustrates what happens when the government that does the drumming fails to follow that beat.
There will be a Q&A screening with the director at Arthouse Crouch End on Sun 8 April at 4.00pm.
Directed by Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
Featuring Bo Gritz, Ted Kotcheff, Tudor Gates, Jo McNeal, Jack Mercer. 90 mins
This documentary about “The toughest American soldier ever,” is packed with treasures, but it pretty much leaves you to sift them out for yourself. Bo Gritz is the country's most decorated Green Beret, a special forces operative who did the dirty work in Vietnam, killed around 400 people and was the inspiration for Rambo, and Col Kurtz, and Hannibal in The A-Team. He ran for President before breaking with the military-industrial complex and founding a community in the Idaho wilderness where he trained up people in counterinsurgency techniques to protect them from their own government.
His is the story of post-war America, both real and fantasized, all its dark and dirty secrets leading to it twisting in on itself. It's a remarkable story but one that, during the 10 years spent trailing him, director Zimmerman seems to have mislaid it. Instead, we are presented with is a great, big jumble of stuff, often fascinating, but very little of which is really explained or connected.
For example, at one point we are introduced to a Mr Tudor Gates, a screenwriter probably most famous for a number of British 70s sex comedies he wrote. He is there because he was involved in a fiction film Gritz starred in, and a film record of a mission Gritz went on in Burma in the late 80s, looking for POWs, in which he met notorious drug trafficker Khun Sa. The discovery that the US administration was part of the drugs trade was key to his break with the military establishment, but quite how he came to be there or exactly what he found isn't explored. Never in a movie have I yearned so much for a voice-over narration, or just a few title cards to fill in some details. You spend so much effort trying to process what is what, and who is who, you tend to miss the larger picture.
Now to be fair, I can see how after ten years of traipsing around various State Fair Hall of Fame Gun and Knife Show, “with jewellery for the ladies,” with not much money and no support team, you'd just go enough, it's done, put it out as it is. It's frustrating but what's there is worth your time.
And the big picture is very big. Gritz's hold on the Hollywood vision of war is immense. OK, I think the A-Team connection is tenuous but he did lead a group of native guerrilla soldiers in Cambodia just like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (“a somewhat bad movie” according to Gritz.) The parallels with Rambo are uncanny: he went searching for POWs in Vietnam, trained up the Afghanistan Mujaheddin and went on a mission to Burma, exactly the same locations of the three sequels. (Some of the film's most illuminating extracts are an interview with Ted Kotcheff, the director of the original Rambo film, First Blood, including its original downbeat ending which was rejected by test audiences.)
Somewhere in his remarkable life, there is a potent story about the symbioses between Hollywood and the military and about how the cynical betrayals of American administrations have bred the rabid mistrust of government that drove the patriotic right to disappear into the wilderness with their guns and ammo in search of honour. The States has always had a ferocious gift for drumming love-of-country into even its most diffident citizens and the film illustrates what happens when the government that does the drumming fails to follow that beat.
There will be a Q&A screening with the director at Arthouse Crouch End on Sun 8 April at 4.00pm.
