Sunday 25 September 2011

This Weekends Worst War Films

'The Bridge at Remagen' is just really boring, being centred merely around a bridge.
'Saving Private Ryan' looks worse everytime I see it. It's good for special effects, but not for Tom Hanks, especially not for Tom Hanks, and a horrible sense of sentimentality which Speilberg can't seem to avoid, it's like, would you like a smoothy with your atrocity?
'The Battle of Midway' is baffling, manly because they put potential star Robert Mitchum in a hospital bed from the beginning covered in calamine, and mostly features many pilots and many ships not knowing where they are in the Pacific. This is not very interesting. To make the Battle of Medway boring is quite an achievement.
'Kelly's Heroes' is funny as a comic book, many because Clint and Telly are superheroes in the Ancient Greek tradition. How do they get over that river? (Don't know, it's a miracle baby, doesn't matter) It's a kind of Iliad thing.
I'm hoping tonight they might schedule 'Cross of Iron', because it's the only war movie (pardoning many British classics 'Millions Like Us', 'The Wooden Horse' 'The One that Got Away' 'The Great Escape' etc) where the director (Sam Peckinpah) actually creates a war on set because he's crazy.
If not that, then 'Where Eagles Dare' which features a largely drunk Richard Burton, Eastward, nice looking girls who don't get hurt,  and a plot I still do not understand after watching it, I promise you, at least 900 times (or so it seems). That movie never fails to baffle but entertain.
I'm sure if there are Soviet Russian WW2 movies, they'd run to about a century, because they'd want to include every gruesome detail in there. You see, it all comes down to editing.

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