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Re: Easily the pukiest movie of the decade

Posted by jamesgarvin (A) on November 14, 2004 at 14:14:30

In Reply to: Re: Easily the pukiest movie of the decade posted by Victor Khomenko on November 14, 2004 at 07:09:40:

When noted WW II historian Stephen Ambrose saw the final screening of Saving Private Ryan, he asked the projectionist to stop the film after the opening sequence on Omaha Beach. "I said, "I've got to catch my breath.' I felt as if I hadn't breathed in a half an hour. I walked up the stairs and down the stairs in the theater about 10 times. Finally I got myself composed and said, "OK, roll it!' "

In Zanuck's The Longest Day the whole movie turns on this incident, with Robert Mitchum in the end encouraging a couple of lieutenants to get up there and get those torpedoes under that barbed wire and then get the TNT up to the antitank obstacles at the head of the ravines and blow them up.

And that happens as a climax in the movie, and Robert Mitchum says, "Let's go on up that hill," and it's like the cavalry to the rescue. Guys from all over the beach start yelling like banshees and start moving up that draw. It's a great movie scene, but nothing remotely like that ever happened in fact. What happened in fact was much more like what is in Saving Private Ryan. Those ravines were much too well-defended to get up. The tanks that the infantry were told were going to be coming in with them, beside them -- these swimming tanks, these Shermans that had the inflatable rubber skirts around them, 32 of the 35 of them sank. There was no way to get up the ravines, and the true story of what happened at Omaha was much more inspiring than the way Zanuck presented it.

The search for Private Ryan is fiction," says historian Stephen Ambrose, "but of the kind that illuminates truth rather than diminishing it."

As Miller’s squad moves inland to search for Private Ryan, they enter a decimated French village, where they encounter terrified French civilians and battle a German sniper; Ambrose notes that this is representative of the experiences of Allied forces as they moved off the beaches.

Well, a noted WWII historian, the Academy which awarded Spielberg an Academy Award for best director, and 97% of professional movie critics (including the New York Times, Time Magazine, the L.A. Times, and the Chicago Sun Times) v. Victor. Perhaps you missed your calling, as you are apparently able to see what these professionals failed to see. Or is it more likely they saw what you failed to see? I suspect that if the film was made by a French director, it would have been much better. But then, the French do not make many WWII films, do they? Wonder why. Rather, I suspect that your dislike for this film has more to do with your dislike of Spielberg and Hollywood that on the merit. Simply admit your lack of objectivity and more on.

If nine reviewers loved your amplifier, and one thought is sounded terrible, which opinion would you ask us to believe? Which would be the eccentric? Which opinion would probably be guided by motives other than finding merit? Thought so.

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