Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival

Miracle at St. Anna

Crit

Spike does Italian magical realism.

Heavily melodramatic, largely implausible, but he makes it easy to play along. Omar Benson Miller plays the role of a younger Forest Whitaker.

Maybe the most interesting thing about the film is that while race is in the foreground throughout--the white Army establishment treats its Buffalo Soldiers as an expendable asset (yeah, OK: even more expendable than its white soldiers), and yet the mystery and the magic, the essential elements of the plot, are colorblind. Which leaves us with kind of a schizoid film.

Trailers

• Milk--OK, trailer pushes me over the top to 5.
• Synecdoche, New York--I was already a 5 on this, though I must admit that had I not been, the trailer would not have made it so. This, I fear, is doomed to be a box-office nothing even if it's as good as I'm counting on it being. I just hope more people see it than can pronounce it.
• Battle in Seattle--Looks so, so, so earnest. I'll go if it comes here.
• Also: I'm really ready not to see the What Just Happened? trailer anymore.