They’d just as soon die as stick a nickel in a jukebox.
For those of you who are interested, this is the movie that cemented John Wayne’s image as Hollywood’s personification of the All-American war hero (despite his never serving a day in the military). The former Marion Michael Morrison had made a handful of war movies between 1941 and ’45, but it is Sgt. John Stryker that still forms the public’s perception of Wayne’s tough guy persona.
Every jackass thinks he knows what war is. Especially those who have never been in one.
Clint Eastwood’s cinematic examination of the story behind one of the most famous photographs in history, the flag raising on Mount Suribachi during the Battle for Iwo Jima, does have a great deal of relevance today.
Media manipulation in cases like the rescue of Jessica Lynch and the death of Pat Tillman have somewhat cheapened the meaning of the word hero. This film attempts to look beneath what we think we know about our heroes at the real men beneath the image. It might have succeeded if the film weren’t such a disorganized mess.
Politicians are a lot like diapers. They should be changed frequently, and for the same reasons.
This film probably would have been better off waiting until this year to see the light of day. Not only is this film more appropriate to a time when the list of people not running for President is almost shorter than the list of people running, but it would have given writer and director Barry Levinson an extra year to decide exactly what film he wanted to make and actually get it right.
The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows.
Now here is a movie that never should have worked. By all rights, a sixth entry in a film series that long since run out of steam and sullied the name of the original classic should be a dog, a direct-to-DVD stinker that makes you willing to deal with the devil to get two hours of your life back. When I first heard that sixty-year-old Sylvester Stallone was resurrecting this character, it seemed at the time like the pathetic vanity of a movie star refusing to face the fact of his own mortality. The sight of him strapping on the gloves again should have been laughable.
So what happened?
From my way of thinkin’, sir, this entire mission is a serious misallocation of valuable military resources.
Saving Private Ryan is almost two movies in one. The first is a short but intense 30-minute piece about the Omaha Beach landings while the second is a more traditional “unit” picture running about two-and-a-half hours. Only the presence of the same actors in both ties the two parts together. Each could probably stand separately but folded into the same film, the first part helps give the second, longer narrative layers of meaning and emotional weight that it wouldn’t otherwise carry.
By now we’d come to look at all replacements as dead men who temporarily had the use of the arms and legs.
The Big Red One, Samuel Fuller’s fictionalized retelling of his own experiences as a member of the 1st Infantry Division in World War II, is a particularly effective grunts-eye view of the war, despite its somewhat meager budget. It follows an unnamed Sergeant (Lee Marvin) and four soldiers of his “first squad” who manage to survive the war with him. They join him as inexperienced “wet-noses” before the invasion of North Africa and follow him to the very end of the war, when they liberate a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.
I tell you, Flanagan, there are some pretty peculiar blokes on this beach.
Darryl Zanuck’s multi-national epic occasionally plays like an academic lecture on the events of June 5 and 6, 1944, albeit an interesting lecture with some really cool film. The Longest Day covers the first twenty-four hours of the invasion of France from American, British, French and German perspectives, employing separate directors for each nationality and shooting in the native languages of those involved. This gives the film a level of authenticity that was fairly atypical of war movies of the time.
