Category Archives: movie

The Winter House

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inA female novelist rents a house in New Hampshire for the winter. On one of the first nights, she’s interrupted from sleep by a burglar, Jesse. She doesn’t take the gun downstairs to confront the younger man. He’s in the kitchen eating. Her motherly instincts kick in (although she knows he lying about everything). He says this house belongs to his parents. He’s just dropping by. She doesn’t ask all the questions. He doesn’t want to say why’s he’s come. She doesn’t want to explain why she’s there. She lets him sleep in the upstairs bedroom, next to hers. He leaves the next morning but returns at the some hour that night. Time to call the cops.

They hike and see the panoramic view of New Hampshire’s hills. She learns he once liked to write poetry but preferred drugs. He drinks a lot. He falls asleep on the couch. She puts a blanket over him.

DAY THREE: He’s chopping wood somewhere. She’s at home and is confronted by a goon, a large bald guy looking for Jesse. She appropriately fends of the goon, but doesn’t immediately tell Jesse the goon showed up, a huge coincidence: Remember Jesse had no connection with the house except he once attended a teenage party there. So goon is a character out of no where, but one wonders will Jesse ever confront goon?  As an unrelated plot point the viewers learn Jesse and goon were partners in a recent crime, unsuccessfully pulled off.

DAY FOUR: Jesse reads one of her novels and lands on a prosaic statement which he considers the most profound. She’s pleased, as though it’s the centerpiece of the story. He reads more. She sees the goon in town talking to three thugs. She returns home but doesn’t mention that. He gives a thoroughly bullshit analysis of her novel, which any novelist should be able to brush away. She’s too understanding. They get cozy. The goon and the three thugs show up in a pickup and leave the headlights shining. There’s no explanation but that quartet walks away, out of the movie forever. [Reality: This is a low budget flick and no one had the bucks to allow for broken windows and furniture, amid the bullet holes.] There’s sheet music (mostly sheets, no notes). In the morning the goon and thugs are gone; there’s no pillow talk. 

Jesse turns himself in and the rest of the gang. He’s in the pokey. From the cell he sends a poem. I didn’t hear her read it: Leave poetry to the prose. This movie is nothing to write home about. I hope they don’t make a sequel.   

ENOUGH ALREADY

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Review of THE IMITATION GAME

No one should hurry out to see The Imitation Game, the new British production about the World War Two program surrounding intelligence involving the Enigma machine.

Previous British movies and TV productions have centered on the Enigma machine: Enigma (2001) and Bletchley Park (2011). There is a little known British movie: Men are trained and become transvestites to be dropped into Germany and to get employed in the factory making Enigma Machines, steal the machine… The last movie is cute and complete shameful.

The Enigma machine provided the British and Americans with intelligence, Ultra, knowledge of German military maneuvers and planning. Before June 21, 1941 the British told the Russians invasion is upon you. The Russians ignored it. Montgomery and his planners ignored Enigmas intercepts before invading Belgium and the southern Netherlands in September 1944. It is a reason that military operation failed.

Enigmas is credited with winning the Battle of the Atlantic, safeguarding convoys. That is wrong. The reason the British needed intelligence was their own codes were being read, almost in real time, by the Germans. The intelligence advantage of Enigma was mostly a wash. What won the Battle of the Atlantic was equipment and men. Much of the equipment and weapons, radar/sonar were of British origin advanced further by the Americans. The primary equipment was ships, American produced destroyers and especially escort carriers. The British had the best submarine hunter, Johnnie Walker whom they did not promote. The Americans were very aggressive. That’s why a full U-boat is on exhibit in a museum in Chicago.

Before World War Two the Americans had decrypted the Japanese diplomatic code in real time. Those intercepts were called Magic. The Americans were working on decrypting the Japanese Navel Codes, one intercept leading to the first complete allied victory of the war: Midway. The Americans started from scratch.

With Enigma the British started at the 50 yard line in the 100 yard dash. Poland and the Polish people. In mid-August 1939 Polish intelligence invited French and British intelligence over to the office and said, “Look what we have.” During the previous decade the Poles had workers in the Enigma factory; they had a machine in Warsaw; they had analyzed it operations and its potentialities. The British and French both said, We want it. The Poles shared, and when they were losing and were conquered in the next six weeks, the Poles erased all trace of their enigma intelligence operation: equipment, papers, people. Some Poles ended up in France and later England.

To my knowledge the French have been considerate and gracious not to claim credit in movies or on TV for any Enigma feats. No so the British who won the War by decrypting Enigma intelligence. I’m tired of British hero movies about Enigma. It’s time for the Brits to fess up. The Poles did it.