By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
My best bet this week is “Letters from Baghdad,” the timely, true story of intrepid explorer Gertrude Bell (1858-1926), who influenced Middle Eastern history in the early 1900s.
More influential than her colleague T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), adventurous Bell helped map part of the Arabian Peninsula after World War I. She established the Iraq Museum, which housed artifacts and antiquities of Mesopotamia and was ransacked during the American invasion of Baghdad in 2003.
Assembled from period photographs, archival footage and fake “talking-head” interviews by New York documentarians Sabine Krayenbuhl and Zeva Oelbaum, it chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, the daughter of a British baronet who became the first woman to receive highest honors in modern history at Oxford University.
Superbly narrated by Tilda Swinton from Bell’s own copious correspondence, it follows her solo journey, commanding a 17-camel caravan across the uncharted Arabian desert for 1,500 miles as the first female freelance archaeologist, befriending Bedouins, sheikhs and other tribesmen, learning the local dialects, history and customs.
“I have cut the thread,” Bell wrote. “You will find me a savage, for I have seen and heard strange things and they color the mind.”
Because of her extraordinary knowledge of the Hashemite dynasties and fluency in Arabic, Persian, French, German and English, she was the only woman given diplomatic status at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
That led to Winston Churchill’s invitation to participate in the 1921 Cairo Conference, where Syria’s ruler Faisal was her choice to become king of the newly formed country of Iraq, attempting to encompass Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
“Oil is the trouble, of course,” Bell slyly noted. “Detestable stuff.”
If her exotic saga sounds familiar, perhaps you saw Werner Herzog’s unfortunate “Queen of the Desert” (2015) with Nicole Kidman as Bell.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Letters from Baghdad” is a vividly insightful 7. See it at 4 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 10, in Westport Town Hall auditorium. Tickets are $10 to benefit the Westport Cinema Initiative in partnership with Westport READS.
“Maze Runner: The Death Curse” is the epic finale to the YA trilogy. Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and his buddies have survived a perilous dash through a mysterious labyrinth called The Glade and subsequent trek through a harsh desert wasteland, overseen by a quasi-governmental agency called WCKD (World in Catastrophe: Killerzone Experiment Dept.).
Apparently, they’re immune to the deadly Flare pathogen that has decimated much of the population in this dystopian future.
Sinister WCKD scientists Ava Page (Patricia Clarkson) and Janson (Aiden Gillen) have captured 28 of the untainted, incarcerating them like human guinea pigs in a laboratory in the shiny metropolis known as The Last City, using their blood to concoct a cure for the viral pandemic.
While Thomas is torn between turncoat Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) and forceful Brenda (Rosa Salazar), he is particularly concerned with rescuing his comrade Minho (Ki Hong Lee).
So Thomas and pals Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Frypan (Dexter Darden), along with a battered resistance fighter Lawrence (Walton Groggins), break into the walled fortress, dodging mechanized spiders and zombielike Cranks, revealing a ‘surprise’ character previously presumed dead.
Based on James Dashner’s best-sellers, it’s simplistically adapted by T.S. Nowlin and visual effects supervisor-turned- director Wes Ball, who pay scant attention to character development. Instead, its two-and-a-half hour running time is bloated with visceral, often meaningless chases, shootouts, stunts and action sequences.
On the Granger Gauge, “Maze Runner: The Death Curse” is a frenzied 5, a finale featuring fearless teenagers who turn out to be the world’s last best hope.
Opening with the (unverified) data that Los Angeles is “the bank robbery capital of the world,” “Den of Thieves” reveals the alarming alert that a heist occurs every 48 minutes.
At the major crimes unit of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, ‘Big Nick’ O’Brien (Gerard Butler) is obsessed with these statistics and determined to catch recently paroled Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), whose band of former Marines-turned-bank robbers, known as “The Outlaws,” are planning to rob the downtown branch of the Federal Reserve for $30 million in unmarked bills.
Musing, “We’re dealing with a different animal here,” Big Nick plants a mole within Merrimen’s organization, the hapless young bartender/getaway driver Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr., aka real-life son of Ice Cube), who, unfortunately, blows his cover at a Japanese hibachi restaurant.
Meanwhile, gang member Enson Levoux (Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent) enlists his Outlaw cohorts to intimidate his daughter’s prom date. And Big Nick routinely cheats on his wife, Debbie (Dawn Olivieri), who walks out on him, taking their two young daughters. Ho-hum!
Screenwriter Christian Gudegast makes a less-than-auspicious directorial debut after previously working with brutish Gerard Butler on “London Has Fallen,” perhaps because, in addition to the clichéd dialogue, almost every aspect of his contrived, pointless plot is so obviously influenced by Michael Mann’s “Heat” and Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects.”
On the Granger Gauge, “Den of Thieves” is a familiar 4, a long, loud, logistical crime caper that curdles.
(Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
