Duh, you’re right. My confusion (and more importantly, lack of detail. It lost several awards, not just one, to SPR.)
I am really looking forward to this I hope it isn’t a let down,BoBs was Top.
Reference movies Private Ryan was an incredible movie but I found after all the hype that The Thin Red Line was pretty mediocre.
For anyone who doesn’t know, at least part of this is based on this book by Eugene Sledge.
Which is an excellent book BTW, and if the pertinent parts of the show are half as harrowing and horrific as the same parts of the book, it’ll make “Band of Brothers” look like a Boy Scout hike.
The Thin Red Line was a pretty good book that disappointed me when it was turned into a “spot the star” vehicle, and became mired in what John Huston would call “the metaphysical shit house.”
Personally, I can honestly say I could live the rest of my life fulfilled without another WWII movie, and not just speaking as a book snob who’s satisfied with James Jones’ Thin Red Line or Eugene Sledge’s “With the Old Breed” on the page not the screen.
World War Two will always be easy pickings: the bad guys really were the bad guys that time (or if they’re not, as in “Cross of Iron,” some of them are pointedly bad guys, but just not the ordinaly grunts).
True, the Japanese weren’t the bad guys in “Letters from Iwo Jima,” but Clint Eastwood took his cue from Japanese WWII movies such as “The Burmese Harp,” and “Hell in the Pacific,” which closed over the title card “War is the Enemy.” (sure, but would they use that no-fault message on a movie about The Rape of Nanking?)
I’m tired of a lifetime watching WWII movies made fill all those years they avoided making Vietnam War movies; and then they finally did make Vietnam War movies, and Desert Storm movies, Somalia movies, Iraq/Afghanistan War movies; and then started making WWII movies all over again, but always as “message” movies.
The message being: Americans is a rich country full of swell people, and good war or bad, the way we make war shows these two characteristics to their best effect.
Nuts to that. Just tell me a good story that hasn’t been told to death. I can’t believe that there hasn’t been a movie made about the Czechoslovak Legion in the Russian Civil War (well, I do believe it, because it would have no audience and therefore no production impetus outside Eastern Europe, and until recently the Russians would never tolerate its being made locally). The Great Siege of Malta, the War of the Triple Alliance in South America, the Franco-Thai War, etc.; there are all kinds of true war stories that would make great movies where we don’t need to be beaten over the head with “good vs bad” Just let us enjoy the movie and then use the title card for the end of “Hell in the Pacific,” if that’s what you need for the Oscar clip.
IMO that’s precisely why BoB was such a great series : it didn’t hammer you with jingoistic propaganda. Even though individual episodes followed a theme, there was no great big message besides “well, we fought together. And now we go home. Fat load of good *that *was.”, and finally the characters were not always all that swell - some are bigoted, some shoot prisonners, some shoot unarmed civilians in the back and so forth. As a general rule, the soldiers seem more obsessed about surviving and getting hot chow than fighting the dastardly Hun.
Anyway, worked for me. Hope the Pacific remake is gonna work just as well, although the trailer linked in the OP doesn’t really give me much hope. “I believe in ammunition”, really ? Well, hoo-fucking-ah, soldier.
If you say so. I’ve yet to meet anyone IRL who liked TTRL.
And now you have a lesson regarding statistical validity of anecdotal evidence.
Pearl Harbor domestic gross $198,542,554
The Thin Red Line $36,400,491
Which one is more ‘main stream’?
I hope this series is as good as Band of Brothers. I hope it is faithful to the true story like Band of Brothers.
Personaly I thought Saving Private Ryan was one of the worst war movies ever made and that Tom and Steve made Band of Brothers to redeem their souls.
Yeah, I kind of noticed that too in the trailer. BoB was great because the characters spoke to eachother like real people do in their situation, and from their background. They weren’t constantly expounding on their latest philosophical musings or thowing out one-liners like some kind of schwarzenegger clone.
But this new trailer has me worried - “God made everything, right, even the Japs?” :dubious:
I totally agree with you about the same old topics being done to death and Hollywoods in particular fear of doing anything vaguely innovative.
In their defence though I have watched amongst others Italian war films(sounds like a contradiction in terms I know),a war film made in one of the Baltic republics(might have neen Latvia but not sure),war films made by a union of European continental countrys and even a Mormon war film.
And their two dimensional jingoism knew no bounds,their authenticity appalling and numerous plot holes.
I didn’t watch them so that I could sneer at them but to try and get a different perspective on ww2 and how non English speaking nationals looked on the war.
I just remembered an exception to the rule Stalingrad which is in German (subtitled) ,a truly excellent movie that works on all levels and I totally recommend.
He’s probably the new series’ version of Lt. Speirs - another fan of the melodramatic. I wouldn’t read too much into it.
I thought Downfall was pretty good. Yeah, Hitler’s bunker has been portrayed before, but not this way and not with the focus on non-historical-A-list characters.
As for “The Pacific”, I don’t much care for the philosophical snippets of dialogue nor the sweeping heroic music: kind of goes against everything I’ve read about that theater–namely, you had had death, mud, death, bugs, death, heat, death, stinking unforgiving jungle, and death.
It’s called the Rhodesian Bush War, and trust me, when I get the funding, it’s going to be amazing.
Well, I also don’t know anyone personally (not over the internet) that rates movies on Rotten Tomatoes. That sort of calls into question for me how representative those ratings are.
Perhaps your personal sphere of acquaintances is not quite as influential nor as representative as you think.
At imdb.com:
The Thin Red Line 7.5/10
Pearl Harbor 5.4/10
Sure, a lot more people saw the latter than the former. So what? Since when did movie popularity have anything to do with whether it was good or not?
Uh-huh. I would like to see a stat showing what percentage of the population rates movies on imbd and Rotten Tomatoes before making that judgment.
Since when did internet ratings have anything to do with it either?
Ok. I’m willing to be any money you like that the sample pool of people rating movies at imdb.com and Rotten Tomatoes is FAR larger than your little group of friends.
Apparently, you also don’t quite understand how Rotten Tomatoes works. Their main rating is based on the opinions of established critics. Their “top critics” rating is based on especially well-respected ones with large readerships (or listeners).
But let’s find yet another source.
On Metacritic:
The Tin Red Line Metascore: 78, User Score: 8.4
Pearl Harbor Metascore: 44, User Score: 6.4
That’s three mainstream sources of polls of critics and popular opinion to establish that The Thin Red Line is a fairly well-respected movie, and that Pearl Harbor is not. No, we don’t have any scientific polls, but this is the best we have.
Feel free to disagree. You’ll find ample support, it seems, in your little echo chamber of friends, but the fact is that trashing TTRL is not in line with mainstream opinion.
What an incredibly pointless argument you guys seem to be having.
Sigh. Yeah, you’re right. I’ll drop it.