Change Your Image
subcmdr
He has worked to support the survivors of the World War II cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35) for 25+ years, was named an honorary survivor and their honorary captain in 2005, and has been featured in several global release documentaries on the ship, including “USS Indianapolis: Live from the Deep” (2017, PBS), “USS Indianapolis: Legacy Project” (2016, Tiny Horse Productions), and “USS Indianapolis: the Final Chapter” (2019, PBS).
His narrative titled “Antoinette,” describing his experiences during the September 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon was incorporated into the book Operation Homecoming, published by Random House (2006). He was featured in the 2016 PBS documentary, “9/11: Inside the Pentagon” and the 2020 History Channel documentary, “9/11: The Pentagon.”
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Oppenheimer (2023)
Important movie, but unnecessarily difficult to follow
So... saw the movie "Oppenheimer" last night on opening night. Happy to see that against "Barbie," a movie about history was doing relatively well-theater packed. But this movie was done in typical Christopher Nolan film, most shots lasting 5 seconds or less resulting in a jumping narrative style, that when combined with the technical jargon and the too loud "Hans Zimmer-like" soundtrack made it difficult to understand, even for a physics-degreed guy wearing hearing aids.
Warning: spoiler alerts contained below!
BLUF: they get the history mostly right, although they attribute certain conversations to the wrong people. Nolan says he did this for clarity in the reduction of number of characters, but in a movie with more than 30 main characters you are expected to track, I can't see how adding one or two more to correct the history would have hurt.
Did I love it? Well, I liked it a lot. I loved the presentation of the physics. Brought me back to my two undergrad courses in quantum theory. Loved the discussion of whether the bomb would set the atmosphere on fire. That was one of the conversations attributed to the wrong guy-the actual guy who did those calculations was one of my grad school profs Robert Hamming. In the movie Oppie asks Einstein in one scene to do the calculation (never happened) and in another scene it was an unnamed character (likely my old prof) who tells Oppie that the probability is "near zero." Fun note: in one of my grad school courses "Hamming on Hamming" he went through those equations with us.
And I loved seeing Tom Conti's portrayal of Albert Einstein. Having read all of Einstein's books in my undergrad days, Conti plays him exactly as I have imagined him.
Another fun scene is when Oppie starts teaching his first class (Berkeley?) and tells his one student who is trying to understand quantum, "You're looking at it the wrong way." I wish I had that prof. I was looking at it the wrong way in undergrad too, but nobody was ever bold enough to tell me that.
But I did not like the gratuitous sex, which added nothing to drive the story forward and seems to have been inserted just because it's what British filmmakers do.
So back to the movie: It ran for 3 hours and didn't feel like it. There were slow parts but I never found myself looking at my watch. The chronology was difficult to follow despite jumping from color (paradoxically, for the sequences happening in the 1940s-1954) and black & white (for the Senate scenes with Admiral Lewis Strauss-played by Robert Downey Jr- mostly taking place in 1959). Strauss is the antagonist who never attended college, made enemies of Chester Nimitz, yet gets a Navy reserve "graveyard promotion" to rear admiral right after WWII and insists on being called "admiral" for the rest of his life. He has a giant chip on his shoulder throughout the movie, which apparently was accurate.
Was the movie accurate from a historical sense? Very much so. Even some of the more contrived and unbelievable scenes (such as the "more useful than a sandwich" scene which humiliated Strauss) actually happened.
If you put differences in Nolan's jumpy, distracting narrative style aside, his biggest miss with the movie is his failure to recognize that something can be "regrettable," yet one still may not regret it.
This is the matter Nolan goes back and forth with Oppenheimer at the end. Does he regret the Hiroshima bomb? Oppenheimer does not say. Yet Oppie clearly feels that the need to drop the bomb was regrettable. Nolan goes back and forth with this as if it is a paradox, but it's not. Any sane human being regrets the fact that something substantial had to happen for the war to end. And as we cover in our episodes of "The Unauthorized History of the Pacific War" podcast, dropping the bomb was the least bad choice of many really bad options, one which actually minimized the loss of life necessary to end the war. Anyone who thinks otherwise has to ignore the facts of the conflict and many contemporary statements, most notably from the Japanese leaders themselves.
Is "Oppenheimer" worth seeing? Absolutely- if for no other reason than we need serious movies to compete in the box office with comic book and toy movies else they will stop making serious movies.
But whatever you do, stay to the end, that final scene with Oppenheimer and Einstein. The closing line of that movie may be one of the best lines for film ever written.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Navy guy says Better than the original
When the first Top Gun movie came out I was the only submariner in a class full of naval aviators in the Spacecraft Systems Engineering program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. It was fun watching my classmates' back-slapping after we viewed the movie together. (A few years later the roles would be reversed when The Hunt for Red October came out.)
Fun fact: when we students would have to fly back-and-forth from Monterey to LAX back in my flying days, this submariner would be the pilot because none of my naval aviator friends were rated to fly the Piper Cherokee 6 we had at NPS. They loved that!
In any case, last night we watched Top Gun: Maverick and it was simply terrific. Way better than the first one. Much more realism, texture, and nuance. (I don't think Tom Cruise did nuance when he was in his 20s.) And a whole lot of memorable lines. One of my favorites: Admiral to Maverick: "You're still a captain." Maverick to Admiral, "Yes, but a highly decorated one."
Loved it. And I agree-- this is a movie that should be seen on the big screen.
Midway (2019)
10 Stars from 26-year Navy veteran
If you want to bypass the quibbles and get straight to the meat of this review, please skip to my last paragraph.
The Battle of Midway is a story that's well known to most Annapolis graduates of my generation and earlier. The battle was a key inflection point in World War II, perhaps the pivotal moment changing the course of the Pacific War.
Although I loved seeing Henry Fonda as Nimitz in the 1976 version of "Midway" (Fonda was to play Nimitz in "In Harms Way" as well), unfortunately, I found that movie to be surprisingly dull, historically inaccurate, unnecessarily melodramatic, and generally not very good.
Because my experience is that more recent movie renderings of historical subjects usually don't improve the historical accuracy (I'm thinking of 2001's God-awful Ben Affleck "Pearl Harbor" vis-à-vis 1970's "Tora Tora Tora"), I did not have high hopes for this new "Midway."
I was wrong.
In short, "Midway" is a terrific movie. Not only does it get the history (mostly) right, it's a tight, elegant, and superb rendering that does the historical figures proud. It succeeds to pack way more into its 2 hour, 18 minute run length than you can imagine. It covers the attack on Pearl Harbor, the PACFLT-Washington tension & dynamic, Nimitz's ascension to command of the Pacific, LCDR Layton's contribution to the intelligence picture, Joe Rochefort's robe-wearing genius, Yamamoto's soul-searching, Halsey's tenacity, the ascendency of naval aviation, a tiny bit of the submarine contributions to the battle, and-oh yeah-the actual battle itself, to include the incredible, unbelievable jaw-dropping (but true!) heroism of our Yorktown and Enterprise naval aviators. And it does all this justice, in a superb bit of moviemaking.
Can a 26-year Navy veteran like me find nits to pick on? Of course:
- I saw a few collar devices that weren't pinned on right (I'm talking about you, Layton!)
- At least one scene that is historical legend but didn't really happen
- The substantially underrepresented submarine role in the battle (being a submariner, perhaps my biggest regret)
- Some Annapolis grads wearing their class ring on the wrong hand (tradition has us wearing our rings on our left hand, not the right)
- Sailors not "squaring away" their Dixie cup hats the way they would have back then
- I wish the Pearl Harbor officers' club was as nice as they portrayed it in the movie!
- They placed a non-existent cemetery on Pearl Harbor's Hospital Point
- Kimmel didn't watch the attack from the Pacific Fleet headquarters, he watched it from his office on the Pearl Harbor submarine base (which later became my office and is on the national register of historic places)
- They would not have worn their service dress khaki in the Officer's Club-- they would have worn service dress whites (chokers)
- The band in the O-club would have been locals not sailors (they missed an opportunity to have somebody like Gabby Pahinui playing!)
But the good stuff way exceeds the nits:
- They got the Pacific Fleet headquarters right-- it's now the Pearl Harbor shipyard commander's building
- They got the torpedo failures right-- torpedoes were terrible early in the war
- They got the Yorktown repair in 48 hours in Drydock 4 in the Pearl Harbor shipyard right-- the shipyard rendering was near perfect
- They got the code breaking room in the basement of the PACFLT headquarters right (when I was stationed there the room was being used to store furniture and I petitioned to get it on the national register of historic places)
- It might have been a lot of CGI, but it was really good CGI. They rendered Pearl Harbor almost perfectly. I could even make out my Ford Island house from my time as commodore, as well as a historically accurate rendering of Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, the Pearl Harbor submarine base, and of course, the ships and planes.
- Something I never thought I'd hear myself say: Woody Harrelson was superb as Nimitz. He's no Fonda, but he was understated and believable, the way I've always seen Nimitz in my mind. Not a casting idea I would have thought of, but it worked!
- Except for the collar device issue listed above, the uniforms were exactly right for the period, from the flat shoulder boards that were being used in that era, to the beaten-up look the ship's laundry would have given Service Dress Khaki, to the way the sailors were dressed, to the way the pilots wore their wings, etc.
- It even brought out the fact that movie director John Ford was on Midway doing a documentary when the battle went down. The fact that Ford volunteered for the Navy, saw battle, and was injured, while John Wayne remained (in his mind) safely at home, become a point of tension between the two men, with Ford being one of the few who felt comfortable belittling Wayne for his lack of service as the years went by.
- I really liked the outtro mini-bios of the real characters at the end. I didn't learn anything new there, but thought they were extremely well done.
In the end the 2+ hours flew by for me. It was so good, I plan on seeing it again next weekend. What a terrific way to celebrate Veteran's Day.
Of course, Roland Emmerich's prior movies have been, on the whole, simpleminded blockbusters. But this time he took a risk by doing something thoughtful, respectful, accurate, and artistic. The only way to ensure movies like this continue to be made is for the public to show we care about history and accuracy, and to make this movie a success. I very much hope it does well. Then maybe we have a chance of getting the right movie made about the Indianapolis.
A final thought: I've been disgusted by many of the cynical, snarky reviews written by professional movie reviewers, many of which sneer at the bravery of the warriors depicted. Yes, the dialog in this movie is sometimes simple, tired, and trite. A few of the characters are not well developed, particularly the women. It's perfectly appropriate for reviewers to criticize elements of moviemaking. One reviewer made fun of the line of dialog where Best says "This is for Pearl Harbor." There is nothing silly or unreasonable about that line. You can bet one of the pilots actually said something like that that day. As somebody who survived 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, when I later went to Afghanistan, you can bet if I had the chance to do so I would have said, "This is for Gerry DeConto," one of my friends who didn't make it out that day. But many these sneering reviewers have gone on to say to readers that because of these weaknesses, they should not see "Midway." Keep in mind that there were similar elements of Spielberg's "Lincoln" that could be considered inaccurate and/or over-the-top movie-making (most of the scenes depicted in Congress, for example), but on the whole the events portrayed in that movie are important for Americans to understand. Same is true here. So the point I want to make is this: a movie can have elements of poor moviemaking, and yet be an important movie for viewers to watch. "Midway" is one such movie. It depicts a poorly understood event in American history, but one that Americans should be exposed to. The events depicted, and the people depicted, are real. They really did these things. The bravery was real. Americans need to know this, and reviewers who have likely never risked anything in their lives should have the good graces not to sneer at those who have.
Le chant du loup (2019)
This is the submarine movie to ride
As a retired submarine captain, I tried forcing myself to sit through 4 of the 8 episodes of the horrible Hulu miniseries "Das Boot," (see my review titled "Abandon This Ship"), before a friend pointed me to this (also subtitled) French movie, "The Wolf's Call," which is so much better.
The movie starts with a wonderful Aristotle quote: "There are three kinds of human beings, the living, the dead, and those who go to sea...." What a great quote. Because most "famous" quotes are improperly attributed (examples, Einstein never said "spend 55 minutes studying problem and five minutes solving it," Mark Twain never said "golf was a good walk spoiled," Abraham Lincoln never said "better to stay silent and let them think you a fool..."), I looked for verification that Aristotle really said this, and was unable to confirm it's accurate. Too bad. It's a great quote for those of us who've spent years at sea. But I digress.
As bad as the Hulu/German submarine miniseries "Das Boot" is, this French submarine movie is that good. Not only is it good, it may be the best submarine movie since "Crimson Tide."
A few highlights:
- Gotta love a movie that includes both submarines and SEALs. Or do the French refer to their SEALs as "FROGs?" (Sorry, couldn't help myself.)
- Apparently, officers operate French sonar? I qualified on sonar when I was Sonar Officer, but I could never do anything like this dude does. This Ensign is better on sonar than the best specialist I ever saw.
- How is it that the French have better underway uniforms than the US Navy does?
- Dig that boomer wardroom! Submarine outfitted by Four Seasons Hotels. All we had on my submarine was a small fish tank in Crew's Mess. (The Fish Tank inside the People Tank.)
- Best line from the movie: Admiral to Captain: "Why doesn't that computer work?" Captain to Admiral: "Because this is France."
- Finally get to see a sailor struggling to move around the boat in an Emergency Air Breathing (EAB) apparatus, just like I used to do. Now that's realism!
- Here's a computer monitor display from the movie that I wish I had on my submarine: "Torpedo Party!" When I saw this computer screen in the movie, I thought they were about to play music and break out beer in the Torpedo Room. But it turns out the display really said "Torpedo Partie," which I guess in French means "torpedo away" (as in, Torpedo Launched). Too bad, "Torpedo Party" sounded like a lot more fun.
- Hey, they actually use the emergency escape trunk to get out of the submarine and up to the surface! But the dude didn't exhale on the way up to the surface, and would have been embolized. Glad I only had to do that once (in sub school).
And of course, the movie wasn't perfect, so I can't help but point out a few quibbles:
- They continuously pass "rig ship for ultra-quiet" on the ship's announcing system (1MC). That's like screaming "BE QUIET!!!" at the top of your lungs.... Kinda defeats the point.
- An officer pops positive for cannabis and is surprised this happened? Then he cries when he gets kicked off the boat. He must really like submarine duty.
- I'm certain there must be a French law that imposes a firm, statutory requirement that every French movie must contain at least one gratuitous nude scene. This one is no different. I guess that's what makes it French. How unfortunate-it limits the spectrum of whom I'm willing to recommend the movie to.
- The actors' salutes are all funky. Some do it "Brit style" (palm forward), some American style. Are they really this confused in the French navy?
- French submarines must be part of their Coast Guard because they never operate so far from land that a helicopter can't reach them.
- Oh-oh... tired cliché #1: the XO's fighting the captain again. Seems to have happened in every submarine movie since "Run Silent Run Deep." Glad my XOs didn't behave this way!
- And yes, of course, tired cliché #2: a torpedo falls and injures a sailor. This phenomenon happens in every single submarine movie ever made, but never happened on any one of my boats. How lucky I must have been. Wait, my first boat did drop a test shape into the torpedo room almost killing a sailor, maybe it's not so far-fetched after all...
All in all, very entertaining, and recommended.
Das Boot (2018)
"Das Boot" on Hulu: Please Abandon This Ship.
As a submariner, an aficionado of submarine movies, and someone who loved Wolfgang Petersen's original film, I was really looking to the limited series of "Das Boot."
Petersen's film is one of my favorites. Really gave voice to the gritty, stinky, unpleasant, fear-stricken reality of a submarine in combat. Because there is just so more depth you can go into with a miniseries that you can't cover in even a 2-hour feature film, I expected the limited series to be a remarkable experience.
But over the first four episodes of this series (the point at which I finally had to stop watching), the show crossed from merely bad filmmaking, into the realm of egregious, outrageous nonsense.
Where it crossed the line: by grossly misinforming viewers, the majority of whom are unaware and ignorant of World War II history and events, of some of the most significant events in the European theater of operations. For example, the only American character in this European Union-made drama is a distinguished American citizen who is actually a war profiteer secretly selling the Nazis equipment in order to finance his ambitions to be president. So, in part, a movie about U-boats turns itself into an opportunity to sneer at the nation that liberated Europe. This plot point crossed the line from merely being a dramatic device to outrageously offensive crap. Draw your own conclusions as to the truth of such a message, but it outrages me.
If you think my reading of that message is over the top, then I'll just tick off a few of the hundreds of the tired cliches that make this a bad fit of melodrama masquerading as suspense:
- Unproven officer trying to live up to his hero-father's legacy? Check.
- Mutinous XO trying at every turn to undercut his unproven captain? Check
- Melodramatic backstory of Gestapo officer trying to woo French citizen by proving he's just a normal guy forced to uphold the orders of those evil men back in Berlin? Check.
- Communist partisan power female figure who chain-smokes cigarettes while embarrassing the male partisans into action? Check.
- Second partisan female who is captured in perhaps the stupidest, most canned bit of police action you can ever imagine, then goes to prison and endures relentless torture protecting the identity of "the guys," eventually volunteering to die rather than snitch? Check.
- Gratuitous violence against women? Check.
- De rigueur scene where torpedo breaks loose in torpedo room critically injuring a sailor? Check.
- German sailor who gets a Jewish girl pregnant and has to get fake American passports to get her out of the country, a scene straight out of Casablanca? Check.
- Sailor actors leaning into nonexistent wind while supposedly steaming at Ahead Full on the surface, but are really bobbing up and down on a fake submarine that's dead-in-the-water, going nowhere? Check.
- Nearly everyone understands and speaks English when it's advantageous for the story for them to do so, but otherwise speaks only in subtitled German? Check.
- The Getsapo officer and the German Navy Commodore break into English whenever they are alone with each other, while neither can actually speak French, the country that they have occupied and in which they live? Check.
- The misunderstood Nazi who is really a nice guy but is merely following orders from those evil dudes in Berlin? Check. (There must have been a couple million nice guy Nazis merely following orders during that war by my count.)
- The Nazi sympathizer whose eyes are opened in response to insidious action by the Nazis, eventually turning her into a Partisan? (I didn't actually stay with the program long enough to confirm that she does, but that's where her obvious trajectory is taking her, so Check.)
- The jack-booted Nazi who thinks those cowardly, traitorous dudes back in Berlin aren't pushing hard enough to win the war? Check.
- The happy, cheerful French house of ill repute with welcoming kind-hearted French women, who say they are merely allowing the jack-booted, women-beating German soldiers to "have a good time?" Check.
- The prisoner exchange of an American who has an audacious, affected, over-the-top New York accent, the kind you only hear in movies? Check.
- The "it was a setup!" prisoner exchange on an American ship that somehow couldn't have anticipated that the German submarine would be able to sink them if the exchange didn't go as planned, and are "shocked shocked" that the bad Germans would ever do such a thing, forcing the Americans to do what they actually committed to do? Check.
- The partisans who have dialogs where one side speaks nothing but English while the other side responds with nothing but French, like C3PO dialoging with R2D2? Check.
- The captain who is held out as a coward by his crew when he decides to actually follow orders to disengage from battle and instead carry out a special operation of great importance to the defense of Germany? Check.
- The captain who, when a sailor somehow fails to die after being shot by a firing squad, pulls out a Lugar and shoots the kid himself? Check.
Oh, I could go on. But I won't. I've given up watching the thing.
I had to GIVE THE BOOT to "Das Boot"
The Da Vinci Code (2006)
The book was bad, the movie was worse
I read Brown's book because I thought where there was smoke, there had to be fire. Any book that sells this many copies must certainly be moderately well-written, right? How could so many people be wrong? Well, they were. It was horrible. I did not expect art, but the book was less artful than Tom Clancy. Pedantic, preachy, atrocious dialog, this was a book written by a man who thought that as long as he generated an intricate plot, he could skip the inconvenient step of actually WRITING. This book made Dan Brown rich, but it did not make him a writer.
But still, the underlying core of a good story was there, buried beneath the morass of tortured prose. And so I thought, if anyone could correct the fatuous language, Ron Howard and Sony could certainly afford a screenwriter capable of untangling this mess. I was wrong. It appears that the script merely lifted Dan Brown's horrible language from the book. This is the kind of writing that makes one wish the word processor had never been invented. Copy and paste screen writing. But hearing these words in your mind's ear as you read the book, uttered by characters who aren't really there, is one thing. Hearing these ridiculous lines half-heartedly recited by Tom Hanks makes them even more preposterous.
The worst movie Tom Hanks has ever made. Possibly the worst screenplay adaptation of a book this decade. And it's difficult to determine if and where Ron Howard added value.