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Colonel Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg and Tom Cruise

What a gyp. I expected Valkyrie to be ghastly but it’s quite decent. Somewhat stiff, but not the disaster I’d been led to expect. Clearly everyone’s turned on Tom Cruise: after years of sucking up to him they’ve decided that he’s mad and they have to cover up their lip prints on his shoes.

Valkyrie’s two main problems: the material, and Tom Cruise. Director Bryan Singer and writer Christopher McQuarrie signed on to make a thriller about an event whose outcome is well-known. (The audience may be unaware of the plots in the German military establishment to kill Hitler, but they have some idea that Hitler was not assassinated by his own men. At least I hope they do. Many years ago I was at a screening of Romeo and Juliet, and the girls sitting behind me were genuinely shocked at the ending.) Singer and McQuarrie may have brought us The Usual Suspects, but barring an alternative-history approach I don’t see how they could’ve Keyser Soze’d this material. Parts of it are thrilling, though. In one squirm-inducing scene, Stauffenberg has to arm the bomb with his one hand but it keeps slipping from his grasp.

Then there is Cruise. He is miscast as an aristocratic German patriot. He does not convey Stauffenberg’s moral convictions, inner conflict, or the burden of command. Though he is in his 40s, he still comes across as a boy playing dress-up. In one scene Stauffenberg, who lost an eye while serving in North Africa, takes off his eyepatch to put on a glass eye cover. This is interesting because Cruise’s liabilities as an actor are his eyes and his voice. His eyes are cold and expressionless—he is a cypher, which is why he is effective at playing assholes (Rainman—too bad the audience was taken in by Hoffman’s autistic savant act, Magnolia—they should’ve given him the Oscar so he would stop trying so hard, and Tropic Thunder—it’s a good idea to make him unrecognizable). The glass eye: redundant. As for his voice, it is not one to inspire awe and loyalty among his men, and when he raises it, it gets whiny.

Stauffenberg is an old school hero-type role, and Tom just doesn’t have the heft. Halfway through the movie, Thomas Kretschmann turns up—there’s an old school hero type, and he’s already played a sympathetic Nazi in Polanski’s The Pianist. As for the rest of the cast, Kenneth Branagh appears early on as a conspirator, only to be sent to the front and replaced by Cruise. You feel the loss. Oy, the ups and downs of a career: Branagh played Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference in the TV movie Conspiracy, and he was so brilliant it was terrifying. Valkyrie has plenty of prestige casting. Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp walk through their roles and Tom Hollander is properly nasty. Bill Nighy and Eddie Izzard play a couple of generals who are in on the plot. I don’t know about you, but if I were planning to kill the Fuhrer, Nighy and Izzard would not be my go-to guys.

As the conspiracy unfolds many documents are prepared and telegrams sent out, and that’s when you see how the Germans nearly took over the world: their spelling and typing are perfect.

Background reading: Why did Stauffenberg plant the bomb? by Richard J. Evans. Karl Heinz Bohrer disagrees.

Photo: Sean Penn and Harvey Milk

The events described in Milk seem like records from a distant era, so it’s startling to realize that they happened just 30 years ago. Movies based on the lives of public figures tend to play like history lessons—you keep glancing at your watch to see how much more edification you must endure—but Gus Van Sant has crafted a vital and compelling piece of cinema. Based on the life of the assassinated gay rights activist turned San Francisco supervisor, Milk is the story of how one citizen becomes involved in the political life of a nation.

Harvey, a New York-born insurance company employee, moves to San Francisco with his boyfriend and opens a camera shop on the Castro. It’s the early Seventies: a gay man risks losing his job if he is exposed. He soon finds that San Francisco is not as tolerant as he’d hoped, and the Christian right is waging war on anyone who disagrees with them. Harvey quickly marshals the power of numbers, organizing the gay residents in a boycott of Coors beer and building an alliance with the Teamsters, of all people. It dawns on Harvey and his friends that if they want to be left alone and treated just like everyone else, they have to fight.

The political awakening of Harvey Milk is presented without rhetoric or phony sentimentality. Harvey learns politics the hard way, losing in three elections. He becomes a savvy politician—he adjusts his personal style, then repackages himself as a mediator when a riot threatens to break out—but you never forget that he’s a human being (with a messy personal life embodied at one point by Diego Luna). This is possible because the actor playing Milk is so good, you forget that he is the great Sean Penn. He is surrounded by a fine cast including James Franco as his boyfriend, Emile Hirsch as the part-time hustler who becomes his fiercest operative, and Josh Brolin, who hints at the inner terror and self-loathing of the assassin Dan White. (He also played Dubya in the Oliver Stone movie.) Milk is the stirring tale of an outsider who fought his way in so he could fling the closet doors open.

Slumdog Millionaire stars the city of Mumbai as call center capital, megalopolis, and landfill. Foreign Policy has a photo essay on the real slumdogs.

Slum sprawl: Dharavi expands across a square mile of prime real estate smack in the middle of Mumbai, between the two busiest rail lines and near the swanky Bandra Kurla Complex, a glimmering corporate center. For the political and business elite, Dharavi is an absolute eyesore. Rats scurry through gutters. Men sit waist deep in trash, sorting it. Bloody viscera from mutton stalls trickle through open drains. The place reeks of sewage. Yet, the land is worth $10 billion by one estimate. Consequently, the city has developed a controversial plan to raze Dharavi, seen here on Feb. 3.

One of the most important Roman discoveries of the last fifteen years is still little known. Unearthed in northern Greece, it is the monument erected to commemorate the naval battle of Actium in 31 BC, fought between Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) on the one side and Mark Antony, with his lover and financial backer, Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt, on the other. Victory effectively handed to Octavian control of the Roman world, and ended the decade of civil wars that had followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. Antony and Cleopatra, the rival claimants to power, sloped back to Alexandria, the capital of Egypt. The vast memorial to the battle is a major work of Roman state art, with terraces, colonnades, freestanding statues, and a large altar covered with sculpture celebrating the new Augustan regime. It stood on a prominent headland, overlooking the site of the battle, reportedly on the exact spot where Octavian had pitched his tent before the engagement and just outside his new city of Nikopolis (“Victory Town”)…

Mary Beard reviews Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley.

The planet’s most wretched places are not always the most dangerous, says The Economist. State collapse is hard to measure.

If definitions are elusive, what about degrees of state failure? Perhaps the most detailed study is the index of state weakness in developing countries drawn up by the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC. This synthesises 20 different indicators and identifies three “failed” states—Somalia, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo—along with 24 other “critically weak” ones. One striking feature of such tables is that states fail in different ways.

The papers this weekend carried reports on the attempts to get a photo op with US President Obama. Anyone have a spare copy of He’s Just Not That Into You?

You and your friends are going to the movies. You’re already at the mall, so you decide to buy the tickets right there instead of getting them online.

You line up at the box-office. The next screening of the movie you want to see starts in twenty minutes, but there’s just one couple ahead of you in the queue, so there should be no problem.

That’s what you think.

They’re clinging tightly to each other like survivors of a shipwreck washed up on an island and surrounded by predators waiting to snatch their precious mates, but that’s none of your business.

When the ticket-seller asks them which movie they intend to see, they respond by asking her what movies are showing. The marquee is in their faces and there are posters marked “Now Showing” in the lobby, but apparently these unfortunate people never learned to read. The ticket-seller rattles off the titles of the movies. They ask her to repeat them. Then they ask her who’s starring in each movie, and what the movie is about. They discuss the movies among themselves, including reviews they’ve read on the Internet, and the opinions expressed by people who have seen the movies.

This takes five minutes. You can fidget and clear your throat all you want, but they will not be moved.

Finally they reach a decision as to which movie they will see. Oh, happy day! Now you can get your tickets…

They look at the screening schedules and confer as to which time would be most convenient for them. What about the 4pm, he asks. I want to go shopping first, she replies. But we’re expected at 7pm, he reminds her. They discuss their mealtimes, weekend itineraries, shopping lists and so on. It is way more information than the ticket-seller or you, the hapless people in line behind them, can possibly need.

You are losing your patience, but you restrain yourself; you politely mention to them that your movie is about to start and suggest that they either pick up the pace or allow you to get your tickets while they are mulling over their new proof of Fermat’s theorem. If they heard you, they give no indication; their total lack of consideration for other humans (plus monstrous sense of entitlement) protects them like a force field. In the end they do what indecisive twerps have done through the ages. They call her mother and make her choose the time. Calloo, callay!

Now comes the real challenge: selecting the seats. They look at the diagram on the screen, then refer to the printed version, but their faces are void of comprehension. They may as well be taking a calculus exam. Which side is the screen on again? Do the X’s mean the seats are taken or not? She wants a seat in the back because she gets headaches at the movies, but he’s forgotten his glasses so he needs to sit close to the screen…

A millisecond before you go Christian Bale on them, they conclude the transaction and wander off to the refreshments stand, where they will infuriate several dozen more people. You and your friends get to your movie ten seconds into the opening credits. You have missed the trailers.

From Cracked: The Eight Customers Everyone Hates.