Mud Songs

Valiant is about carrier pigeons during WWII. It is the worst computer animated film I’ve seen to date. It is so dull, uninteresting, unfunny, I would have walked out of the theatre when I saw it if I was by myself. I could smoke a pound of weed and write a better script than Valiant. It may have worked as an animated short, but there’s not enough to hold out for a full-length feature. And not a thing to look at it. Computer animated movies for kids should be at least visually stimulating, give the kiddies something goosh about. But there is nothing to see here, folks. The most vibrant colour I saw was grey. Skip this movie. It’s a stinker.

Just because The Grey Zone is about the Holocaust doesn’t make it a noble movie worth watching. It tells the story of a group of people who organized an an armed uprising at Auschwitz in 1944. To make a movie about this kind of historical event, you have to do it right or not at all, and this movie doesn’t exactly do it right. It seems to be a competent telling of the story (if they got all their facts straight), but it’s almost an embarrassment too. The first mistake — and it’s a big one — is having all the “good guys” speak with pure 100% American accents, and all the bad, evil Nazi commanders speak with German accents. I had no idea there were so many Californian Jews in Auschwitz. I thought they were mainly Hungarian and Polish. It’s details like this (and there are plenty of them) that kind of give it away, kind of blows their cover, if you know what mean. It feels a bunch of actors walking around in Nazi outfits trying to look tough. Some scenes are almost comical — and I really don’t think that’s the effect you want to go for in a movie like this. Although The Grey Zone presents a story worth telling, certain aspects of this particular presentation of it seem to undermine the profundity the historical facts. I don’t recommend it. Read Miklos Nyiszli’s book instead. [Commentary originally from 2003.]