Life in the Korengal Valley was not all fun and games for Specialist Misha Pemble-Belkin, Ross Murphy, and the rest of Battle Company, 173rd US Airborne at Outpost Restrepo in Afghanistan (photo © Tim Hetherington)
RESTREPO: ONE PLATOON, ONE YEAR, ONE VALLEY (Sebastian Junger & Tim Hetherington, 2010)
Paley Center for Media
25 West 52nd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, February 10, $20, 6:30
212-621-6800
www.restrepothemovie.com
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From June 2007 to July 2008, journalists Sebastian Junger (THE PERFECT STORM) and Tim Hetherington (LIBERIA: AN UNCIVIL WAR) made a total of ten trips to the dangerous Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, documenting the full deployment of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. With snipers hidden all around them, the fifteen soldiers of Second Platoon built a remote, strategic outpost they named Restrepo after PFC Juan Restrepo, the well-liked company medic who was killed early on. Junger and Hetherington film such men as Captain Dan Kearney, Staff Sergeant Kevin Rice, and Sergeant Brendan C. O’Byrne as they go about their daily duties, joking around, playing the guitar, meeting with Afghan locals to get information about the Taliban, and digging trenches while prepared to be shot at at any moment. The journalists took more than 150 hours of footage, supplemented with interviews with several of the soldiers after they were safely back at home base in Italy, talking about what they went through. There is nothing political about RESTREPO, nor does it pull at the heartstrings with melodramatic, overemotional scenes; instead, it depicts the harsh realities of battle, including the long stretches of boredom punctuated by sudden life-or-death situations. There is no narration, no one discusses the possible merits of the war, and no generals or politicians are on hand to defend America’s involvement in the region. There’s no ethnocentric yahooism, nor is there racist treatment of the mostly unseen enemy. It’s just war, pure and simple, seen from the perspective of men who chose to join the army and risk their lives for their country. The film won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Festival and also screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, RESTREPO is having a special presentation February 10 at the Paley Center, followed by a panel discussion with Junger, Hetherington, and THE WRONG WAR author Bing West, moderated by Foreign Affairs’ Gideon Rose.
Indie writer, actor, and director 
The 1950 lurid Gothic noir melodrama HOUSE BY THE RIVER might be midlevel Fritz Lang, but even second-rate Lang is worth watching. Louis Hayward stars as Stephen Byrne, a novelist who lives on the riverside of a small town with his wife, Marjorie (Jane Wyatt), and young maid, Emily (Dorothy Patrick), next to a very nosy neighbor, Mrs. Ambrose (Ann Shoemaker). On a lonely, unproductive afternoon, Stephen gets excited while allowing Emily to use the master bathroom to bathe and makes a creepy play for her that ends up with him accidentally strangling her. He forces his older brother, John (Lee Bowman), to help him dump the body in the river, and as the lies build, John is wracked with guilt but Stephen takes advantage of his suddenly newfound writing success and popularity. Based on the novel by A. P. Herbert, HOUSE BY THE RIVER is a dark psychological crime mystery that melds Robert Siodmak with Douglas Sirk, with shadowy black-and-white camerawork by Edward J. Cronjager and Lang’s sure hand lifting it above its B-movie elements, with creepy surprises waiting around every corner. HOUSE BY THE RIVER is screening with Lang’s 1953 murder mystery THE BLUE GARDENIA, starring Raymond Burr, Anne Baxter, and Richard Conte, as part of Film Forum’s Fritz Lang in Hollywood series, which continues through February 10 with the twin bill YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937) and YOU AND ME (1938).
Executive producer James Cameron’s mosh-up of TITANIC, AVATAR, ALIENS, and THE ABYSS is, well, abysmal. Inspired by a real-life 1988 expedition documented by SANCTUM writer and producer Andrew Wight in NULLARBOR DREAMING, this underwater spelunking adventure is classic Cameron: a combination of stunning imagery with absurd dialogue and overmanipulated melodrama. Richard Roxburgh stars as Frank McGuire, a tough-as-nails cave diver who has sacrificed his personal life for the opportunity to boldly go where no one has gone before. His latest challenge is a monster cave in Papua, New Guinea, in a dive sponsored by millionaire adventurer Carl Hurley, ridiculously played by Ioan Gruffudd, who awfully delivers the awful dialogue he is given. Carl has brought along his girlfriend, Victoria (Alice Parkinson), while Frank is joined by the seventeen-year-old son he doesn’t know very well, Josh (Rhys Wakefield). After a massive tornado hits them harder and faster than expected, the team is trapped in the seemingly limitless cave system, desperately trying to find a way out before they all drown. The 3-D effects are extremely cool in the beginning, if over the top, but they soon fade into the background as clichéd scene after clichéd scene chokes the story. It quickly devolves into a POSEIDON ADVENTURE wannabe, but with stale characters and little emotional involvement as well as more than its share of unintentional laughs. Still, there are some breathtakingly gorgeous shots, but SANCTUM is, ultimately, all wet.