We got there a bit late, so we had to wolf down the excellent food and pretty much skip the open bar (damn!). Personally, I would have been just as happy to eat and run -- I really had no desire to see the movie. See, it starred... well, there's no easy way to say this, so I'm going to just do it like ripping off a Band-Aid -- itstarredtomselleckasike. Let me repeat that: it starred TOM SELLECK as Ike (what, Treat Williams was too expensive?) Selleck had the good grace to admit during the Q&A, "I'm not sure I would have cast me in this role," which is putting it mildly. Actually, I was really hoping he'd keep his mustache for the role, but he didn't.
The movie is exactly as bland and uninspired as you would expect a movie starring Tom Selleck as Dwight D. Eisenhower to be. To be fair to the movie, it was turned up really loud, presumably for the benefit of all the elderly WWII veterans in the audience, and the sound echoed weirdly, so that it was often difficult for me to decipher the dialogue. To be fair to me, it's a deathly dull movie (SEE Ike attend meeting after gripping meeting! WAIT as he slowly lights cigarette after cigarette!).
Selleck has a certain je ne sais quoi, which is French for "I don't know what... the hell they were thinking when they cast him." The obsequious A&E rep who introduced the film called it Selleck's best performance in his illustrious career, which may be true, but that's sort of like saying the Big Mac is the tastiest sandwich McDonald's has ever made. When Selleck said in the Q&A that he had input on a couple of the casting decisions, I finally understood how Gerald McRaney came to be cast as General George S. Patton. That's right: Major Dad is Patton! The face-off between these two titans of '80s TV crackles with the electricity of a moistened towelette.
I'm not certain the staff at the French Embassy actually screened the movie before agreeing to host the event, because the French are barely mentioned in the movie, and when they are, it's with snarky, tossed-off insults and a petulant, snippy Charles de Gaulle. In a move that must have surprised the arch-conservative Selleck, the French were far more gracious than the movie was to them -- the embassy's military attaché, bedecked with medals and ribbons, stood up in the audience during the Q&A to make a short, elegant speech about how much the French like Ike. He showed no signs of pique at the attitude toward the French in the movie, Selleck's political stance, the lack of French representation on the Q&A panel, or being unceremoniously cut off by an A&E potentate.
Speaking of Selleck's politics, I was pleased -- but I guess also a little disappointed -- that he didn't try to equate D-Day with Operation Iraqi Liberation... oops, I mean Freedom (don't want that pesky OIL acronym...) even when handed an opportunity to do so.
I assume all of you have better things to do on Memorial Day -- and, yes, I count staring blankly into space as a better use of your time -- and I doubt any of you would be lured by the siren song of Tom Selleck as Eisenhower anyway, but I don't recommend this movie. As the French would say, ce-la va sans dire.
*********
"However you choose to characterize what took place --
torture, abuse, or, to use Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's
term,
freedom tickling..."
--Jon Stewart, The
Daily Show, on the events at Abu
Ghraib
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