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AMSTERDAM (2022)

November 29, 2023 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In AMSTERDAM (2022), three people forming a bond during the First World War become tangled in the Business Plot of 1933. Despite a huge celebrity cast, an important message, and the light cast on a pretty scary event in U.S. history, the movie flounders in an overbaked plot that takes too long to get going. I liked it, didn’t love it.

The movie starts with a murder of a beloved general who led troops in combat in the First World War, which embroils a doctor, a nurse, and a lawyer who formed a friendship in a recovery ward during the war. Over time, they uncover a nefarious plot to recruit a popular Marine general to lead a fascist coup.

The movie says it’s based on true events, and yes, General Smedley Butler did indeed claim to be approached by representatives of some of the richest men in America whose corporations had close ties to Germany and feared President Roosevelt’s New Deal. General Butler eventually exposed the plot and testified to Congress. This is pretty scary stuff, an important bit of history you don’t learn at school. Robert De Niro does an impressive job filling the general’s shoes.

Otherwise, Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington shine in their roles, but the story is fairly overwritten, with way too much time spent on developing their friendship and meandering quirky bird walks. By the time the plot is exposed and things start to move in earnest, the story becomes sketchy and not enough to overcome the inertial drag of the first half, and it all emotionally fell flat for me. I believe writer/director David O. Russell, whose films include THREE KINGS and AMERICAN HUSTLE–which I loved–wanted to thematically juxtapose the chaos of democracy, love, art, and humanity against the cold (not to mention overblown and frankly untrue) efficiency of fascism, which is great, but it all came across for me as sappy and earnest (great) but overstuffed and airy (not that great). For me, the friendship is overdone and not terribly interesting, and the Business Plot is underdone while being far more interesting.

Overall, I liked AMSTERDAM. I liked its light on an important but often overlooked bit of American history, its themes of the importance of human values that contradict fascism, the acting and sets, and its overall ambition. Unfortunately, for me, it just couldn’t make its parts add up to achieve what it wanted to be, and as a result sometimes it felt like work.

Filed Under: HISTORY, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV, Other History, The Blog

QRF Releases!

November 17, 2023 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

QRF, my latest military thriller, is now available to read! Available in Kindle eBook, audiobook (narrated by Garrett Brown), and paperback, it’s available exclusively at Amazon.

When an old comrade doing humanitarian work is captured by the Islamic State during the Iraqi civil war in 2016, four war veterans leave their civilian lives to attempt a dangerous rescue in the most dangerous place on Earth. Told in two timelines–the Iraq War and the civil war that followed–QRF is about war and the debts it imposes on those who survive it.

Get it here!

(Special thanks to Jackie Druga for providing the simple, striking cover and Brent Nichols for putting together the paperback.)

Filed Under: Books, CRAIG'S WORK, HISTORY, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Other History, Q.R.F., The Blog

QRF Available for Pre-Order!

September 29, 2023 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

I am excited to announce that my new thriller, QRF, is now available for pre-order for Kindle at Amazon! Releasing November 17, 2023 the book will be available in Kindle, paperback, and audiobook.

When an old comrade doing humanitarian work is captured by ISIS during the Iraqi civil war in 2016, an Iraq War veteran and others from his former unit leave their civilian lives to attempt a high-risk rescue in the most dangerous place on Earth.

Get it here.

Cover by Jackie Druga. Paperback and eBook layout by Brent Nichols.

Thank you for reading!

Filed Under: Books, CRAIG'S WORK, HISTORY, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Other History, Q.R.F., The Blog

PETERLOO (2018)

August 21, 2023 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Directed by Mike Leigh, PETERLOO (2018) is a British historical drama about the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in Manchester, England, currently streaming on Amazon Prime. At nearly 2.5 hours in runtime, the film is powerful if bloated and challenging, particularly with its dense political speeches. Still, the history warranted this approach in my view. From the beautiful cinematography and detailed sets to the historical accuracy and importance of the subject matter, this was a terrific watch for me.

The film’s story plays out in two layers. The first is an average family of British laborers living in Manchester in England’s industrial north, struggling to get by in the economic slump following the Napoleonic Wars. The second is the machinations of radicals hoping to achieve parliamentary reform to give Manchester and the working class greater representation in government, and the utterly corrupt government officials fearing the kind of revolutionary fervor that overthrew the monarchy in France. These storylines come together in a mass rally where the famed radical orator Henry Hunt would give a speech to a crowd of 60,000 people, and the government’s horrific reaction.

The storylines work well together. The leaders of the radical movement clearly spell out the horrible conditions of the working class, greed of the capitalist factory owners, utter corruption of the government, and Britain’s democracy entirely tilted toward government by and for land owners. The family shows us what all this means on a daily basis. Meanwhile, we see the heavy-handedness of the government reaction behind the scenes, with brutal police tactics against dissent that are used to this day, and their willingness to use force to preserve the status quo.

The politics are important but laid on thick, as we see multiple speeches by various radical leaders and a whole lot of interactions between the radical leaders and government officials. Still, I imagine to many viewers this will start to feel like a slog after a while. Personally, I enjoyed the depth and open sentiments, clearly spelling out what was at stake for the average laborer. For our modern times, it provides a nice reminder that while social justice is important, a just economy is just as vital.

Check it out if you’re interested in a deep, fiery historical drama about a little known but very important event in British history, supported by a terrific cast including Rory Kinnear and Karl Johnson.

Filed Under: HISTORY, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV, Other History, The Blog

THE DAYS

July 19, 2023 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Rivaling HBO’s CHERNOBYL in terms of raw drama, Netflix’s THE DAYS is a powerful story that cements the adage that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. In 2011, Japan suffered a triple whammy: a devastating earthquake, resulting 14-meter-tall tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster that rivaled Chernobyl in terms of danger. Sticking as close to the facts as possible, THE DAYS presents a gripping tale of the tragedy as experienced by the workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

As for the disaster, it could have been even more devastating. The earthquake and tsunami knocked out power to the nuclear reactors, resulting in the workers being unable to cycle water to manage the reactor temperatures and resulting pressure. They couldn’t even use their instruments to monitor what was going on. As the fuel rods became exposed and melted down, they released radiation and triggered catastrophic explosions. In time, they threatened to spread radiation across Japan, making at least half the country uninhabitable for generations. Luckily for the world, they didn’t, though for days the reactors were almost fully out of control, and important mechanisms to fix the problem weren’t even approachable for humans due to high radiation levels.

The Japanese miniseries follows an ensemble cast of actors playing various workers, managers, and executives at the power company managing the plant, along with politicians and military personnel trying to stave off disaster. The script masterfully portrays people and institutions in crisis, showing them coming to grips with the disaster and working to solve unprecedented problems with ingenuity, only for cascading effects to thwart them and create new, even bigger problems. The politicians and company executives often get in the way, sometimes out of frustration for lack of information and other times for optics, until they realize what all of Japan is facing and pull out all the stops to help.

Similarly, the managers and workers at the plant slowly realize how hopeless their situation is and struggle emotionally to remain on duty and fight to the last possible second despite the odds and growing risks to dying horribly. One of the things that I loved about CHERNOBYL was the incredible heroism involved in preventing an incredible national and global disaster, and this is on full display in THE DAYS. Also the realism in depicting the reverse: the horror and despair, people cracking under the strain. In one scene, a nuclear expert watching an explosion erupt at the plant falls to his knees keening like a dying animal, and I think he was speaking for all of them, what was going on in their heads.

Overall, I loved this one. A disaster miniseries that is gripping, horrifying, inspiring, and true.

Filed Under: Apocalyptic, APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, Film Shorts/TV, HISTORY, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV, Other History, The Blog

DJINN Now Available for Pre-Order!

May 11, 2023 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

I am excited to announce that DJINN, my supernatural military thriller, is now available for pre-order for Amazon Kindle. This novel reimagines the witch for the War on Terror era, taking the reader on a journey into the heart of darkness that is both human and supernatural.

Here’s the synopsis:

In the violent aftermath of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a photojournalist arrives to learn the fate of the Witch Doctors, a fabled Army occult warfare unit. Holly believes her father, reported missing in action, ran this mysterious outfit that sought to weaponize black magic to win the War on Terror.

As the Taliban advances and the national government crumbles, Holly makes a harrowing journey into the deep desert to an abandoned base, which houses a terrifying secret. There, along with a group of American ex-soldiers, themselves cursed, she will face the ancient evil the Witch Doctors unleashed…

The terrors that live in the world of the djinn. The horrors that lurk in war itself.

DJINN releases June 16 in eBook and trade paperback exclusively through Amazon. Read by Garrett Michael Brown, the audiobook releases the same date.

You can get it here. I hope you’ll check it out. Thank you for reading!

Filed Under: APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, Books, CRAIG'S WORK, Djinn, HISTORY, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Other History, The Blog

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