Wikipedia contributors certainly know how to masticate films, and there is nothing I can illuminate about Valkyrie factually that this entry does not cover, though Lane's quip about English character acting was perhaps the most amusingly accurate. Viewing this movie gave me a brooding, uneasy feeling, as if it prefigures the collapse of the United States in a way I cannot quite quantify. It strikes me once again, that Cruise and I are months apart. Risky Business made him a super citizen, his credo makes him suspect, and I sit in power chairs, scraping bottom barrels, despite the fact that like my former supervisor, I was groomed by *the state* to be a poster child, which may indicate rancor towards social inequality despite my recoil from the rainbow coalition.
That recoil is genuine, although the full extent of my corrosion remains a toss up, in terms of what or who I hate, and why. I am fully aware of my capacity, and if I wanted to, I could mop up the floor with people like Jimmi Shrode and Debra Horne, and indeed, after my fall from grace, I did attack Jimmi's intellectual arguments, in the elevator, on the sidewalk, and he would recoil like wounded blubber, but whether he, or the coffee colored bitch slapper who considers herself a social services professional and isn't, are worth my hate, that question is more painful, not easy, and revolves around competence, entitlement, value judgments I dare making.
von Stauffenberg's motives do not seem so mysterious to me, whether one believes Cruise penetrates the man or not. The elite in the German military came to realize, late in the day, that fascism was destroying German national identity, not vindicating it. But what Cruise does bring to the role, in the same vein that motivates my obsession with pushing back against disability ideology, is that strident focus on the end goal,which is to eliminate the cancer, stop it from progressing, and the character's injuries exemplify this, how hard one has to be to see it through.
Cruise's command of the camera is a gift that most of us lack, and I am not decrying his success. What makes me uneasy is his superlative stature, which to all appearances has erased the identity that had to underly his acting ability, at some point. Perhaps that is a degree of hyperbole, but I doubt the exaggeration goes too far.
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