Films featuring
Joe Turkel

Paths of Glory

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Legendary French director François Truffaut famously said that it was impossible to make a truly anti-war film, because film inherently glamorizes everything it depicts. That quote is hard to reconcile, however, with the evidence of Stanley Kubrick’s first truly great movie. Continue reading

Blade Runner

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’92 “Director’s” Cut: [/types]]
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Blade Runner is the exception that proves the rule that filmmakers should not be allowed to revisit their earlier work, like George Lucas did with Star Wars. Unlike Lucas’s popcorn trilogy, Ridley Scott‘s visionary adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electic Sheep has always seemed like it really was only partially finished.

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The Hindenburg

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Day eight of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

Think of The Hindenburg as kind of like Titanic, except without the romance or an interesting story. Both films deal with fictional portrayals of real life disasters involving famous vessels, one at sea, one in the air, but for Titanic to be as bad as The Hindenburg, Captain Smith would have been shown deliberately steering the ship into the iceberg for reasons that would not be adequately explored.

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The Sand Pebbles

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Day seven of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

In 1966, the Vietnam war was just beginning in earnest and Robert Wise made The Sand Pebbles, an epic about another American intervention in Asia forty years earlier. After watching the film, it’s hard to judge whether the film was anti-Vietnam or just about an American gunboat in China in 1926, which is to its credit. Had Wise chosen to stack the deck politically, it would have weakened what was already a powerful story.

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