Posted on 06/25/2002 4:43:34 PM PDT by Burkeman1
What is the worst war movie you have ever seen? Your reasons can be political, realism, historical innaccuracy, or a mixture but what is the worst?
Hey, a second! I think that, even more than "A Bridge Too Far" serves as an example of a terrible war movie, it serves as an example of hollywood's hate for everything American.
I really dont mind "gory" scenes, the unparalleled horror of war should be honestly shown. hollywood's angle, though, is to depict horror and violence and the outrageous injustice inherent in conflict and not explain what the people are doing, why they are engaged in a particular operation, and what the context is moment by moment.
hollywood intentionally engages in intellectually dishonest mischaracterization of historical events, and leaves out all contextual references explaining who people were, what they were doing and why they were doing it, in an effort to depict heroes as bestial buffoons in service to a fifth column effort to undermine American resolve to avoid becoming slaves of the latest moronic european political statism.
Propaganda, slander, and pointless gore, all intended to demoralize the freest and greatest nation in Earth history.
Kinda explains why leftists are so determinedly blind to the difference between aggressive war of conquest and self defense against unjust aggression.
Hence, today, the left struggles to free terrorists to walk amongst us, tom daschle seeks to turn America against its own self defense even as American soldiers lie bleeding in Afghanistan, and the media see "palistinean" mass murder of women and children and Israeli attempts to forestall further acts of inhumanity as morally equivalent.
et cetera
True story inspired by MASH. My father, brothers and I saw it when it first came out. My father had an aisle seat and actually fell out of it laughing at the opening scene line, "That jeep's not stolen, it's right there!" The story I dragged out of him at home afterwards was this:
He got to the Pacific late as a replacement rifle platoon lieutenant and so, despite surviving all of the 96th Infantry Division's time in the line, didn't have enough points to go home right away when the war ended.
He was instead transferred to the 86th Division on Mindanao Island in the Phillipines as executive officer of its divisional reconnaissance company. It had a lot of jeeps. There was one intact brothel on Mindanao Island which had survived the war, run by a White Russian named Sergei who wanted a jeep.
So the recon company's officers made a deal - one jeep for certain privileges, which Sergei promptly repainted. The 86th's commander saw it and suspected something but couldn't prove it. He did, however, post a guard on the ship which was to carry the recon company (and other units) back to the States. The guard's job was to count and take down the serial numbers of every jeep loaded on board.
So Pop and the other recon officers ran a jeep on board, disassembled it, carried the pieces off the ship, reassembled it, repainted it with the original serial numbers of Sergei's jeep, and loaded it back on board. The general glared at them but said nothing when Sergei drove up in his jeep to wave bon voyage from the dock.
All the personnel were demobilized in San Francisco before the ship's cargo was unloaded. Years later all the recon company officers got bills from the Army demanding $50 each to pay for the jeep. Pop refused because he had a new young family, me included, and couldn't afford it. He wrote back that the Army should consider that his personal war bonus.
The Army retaliated by giving him a general discharge (which meant a little then) from the Involuntary Reserve in April 1950. His reserve MOS was "High Priority Replacement Rifle Company Commander". The Korean War started two months later.
The Thin Red Line - The occupation of Guadalcanal... And we get poetry crap? PLEASE!!!
Okay they took extreme historical liberties on that but I did like some of the Battle Scenes. The actor portraying Cornwallis was great. And it was LESS inaccurate than The Battle Of The Bulge.
Also- "Braveheart" was a disgusting distortion of truth.
True, but the battle scenes were fun to watch....Especially when the Scots lifted their kilts and mooned the English army.
Dang! you beat me!! (Glad to know someone else noticed that too)!
WRONG! That one stunk too. However, the novel (James Jones) was probably the BEST war novel ever written. An INCREDIBLE piece of writing.
That being said, you make my point, none of this was in the movie, purportedly a depiction of historical events, it ignores every pertinent contextual fact that should form the fabric upon which the human experience is imprinted.
Noted theater director Sam Mendes, who was responsible for the acclaimed 1998 revival of Cabaret and Nicole Kidman's turn in The Blue Room, made his motion picture debut with this film about the dark side of an American family, and about the nature and price of beauty in a culture obsessed with outward appearances. Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a man in his mid-40s going through an intense midlife crisis; he's grown cynical and is convinced that he has no reason to go on. Lester's relationship with his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) is not a warm one; while on the surface Carolyn strives to present the image that she's in full control of her life, inside she feels empty and desperate. Their teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is constantly depressed, lacking in self-esteem, and convinced that she's unattractive. Her problems aren't helped by her best friend Angela (Mena Suvari), an aspiring model who is quite beautiful and believes that that alone makes her a worthwhile person. Jane isn't the only one who has noticed that Angela is attractive: Lester has fallen into uncontrollable lust for her, and she becomes part of his drastic plan to change his body and change his life. Meanwhile, next door, Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper) has spent a lifetime in the Marine Corps and can understand and tolerate no other way of life, which makes life difficult for his son Ricky (Wes Bentley), an aspiring filmmaker and part-time drug dealer who is obsessed with beauty, wherever and whatever it may be. American Beauty was also the screen debut for screenwriter.
This one had all the Liberal stereotypes in it.The gay couple who are oh so nice.The former Marine who is a psycho and no doubt a Republican.
"Force Ten From Navarone"
I saw it on VCR with a group of Serbian refugees....the last part of the film has a few printed lines on the screen, where it was stated that the Admiral who risked his command to make sure the pilot was rescued and the muslims of Bosnia got a victory, was thereafter, given a DESK JOB AT THE PENTAGON....well, at this point, my husband said....
"WHERE HE WAS SITING ON 9/11, when an Arabic muslim terrorist with a BOSNIAN PASSPORT...FLEW AN AIRLINER INTO THE BUILDING....MUCH TO HIS DISMAY...AND SINCEREST REGRETS SINCE HE SUPPORTED THE BOSNIAN MUSLIMS AND ARABIC MUJAHADEEN IN ALL THEIR EFFORTS TO KILL THE NON-MUSLIMS OF BOSNIA".
Apocolypse Now was apparantly quite a nightmare to make. The documentary on it is pretty interesting, I hear. Brando showed up really overweight- obviously not fitting the part of a Green Beret Colonel too well. That's why they had to shoot Brando's character in shadow, to hide the fat.
At any rate, when I watch Apocolypse Now, I don't really watch a war movie, I'm watching the cinema version of "Heart of Darkness", a movie that can no longer be made I don't think because of PC reasons. What's interesting about to me is how much of Joseph Conrad's original dialogue are still in the film. Particularly some of Dennis Hopper's- Conrad penned a lot of Hopper's dialogue long long ago, but they fit right in with the times (60s, flower children etc).
The original screenplay is even closer to Heart of Darkness than the onsceen version turned out to be. I wish some director would have the courage to do Heart of Darkness straight from the book- going up the Congo (not Viet Nam)- it would have to be an a$$kicking movie if done right.
No it wasn't. Completely different song.
For sheer irritation, Coming Home with Dennis Weaver breaking his sword in the surf, John Voight eating Jane Fonda--the better approach would be indicting Hanoi Jane
A fifteen-minute black and white North Vietnamese propaganda film without sound in which the action is 1.2 times true speed. Scores of shirtless gooks hauling on long fat vines pulling howitzers up impossibly steep hills while a phalanx of sweaty machete swingers clears the path to attack Dien Bien Phu.
Fail-Safe reducing the epic clash of good and evil to muddy moral equivalence and the respective leaders of the Free World and the Iron Curtain moping about lost lives of wives. My college roommate was the son of a co-author who inhabited a California think tank, giving me the first glimpse of liberal la-la-land.
All Quiet on the Western Front which seemed to be a loop of a water-cooled German heavy machine gun mowing down dough-boys--oh, that was the war.
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