Wednesday, June 07, 2006
DOWNFALL FOLLOW-UP
The movie Downfall sparked some enthusiastic responses in the comments section. Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz reviewed Downfall in some detail back in April of 2005. An excerpt:
"The Third Reich was hammered into the dirt once and for all sixty years ago this month. To celebrate this most fortunate turn of events, I went to see the movie Downfall. (Incidentally the Amazon reviews are very good and worth looking at if you want to know more about the movie.) My short version: It is a 4.5 star movie. Brilliant acting, sets, costumes -- impeccable. Bruno Ganz is a very convincing Hitler. The films is shown mainly from the point of view of Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, played by a talented and beautiful actress Alexandra Maria Lara, which is an effective way to tell the tale. It loses half a star because the battle scenes, raved about by other reviewers, struck me as inadequate. Mostly people running across rubble-strewn streets and diving to the ground as shells come down. We get only one T-34/85 tank? And we see Hitler pinning an Iron Cross on a kid for killing two Soviet tanks with a panzerfaust, but we don't see him do it. This is just not sufficient. The capture of Berlin was the crescendo of the Soviet war effort, and this movie conveys nothing of the vastness of what was going on. The people who made this movie should have spent the money to have at least one scene with swarms of Soviet tanks, or a duel between tanks and anti-tank guns, or something. Film-makers used to know how to make massive war movies that were appropriate in scale to their grand themes. They don't want to spend the money anymore, alas. These are decadent times we are living in. (Where are Lord Lew Grade or Darryl F. Zanuck when you need them?) But this quibble aside, this is far and away the best of the three Hitler-in-the-Bunker movies. You must go see it. "
Lex's post makes me think that while reenacting the scale of major WWII battles on the Eastern Front would be prohibitively costly with live actors and 1:1 replica tanks( Kursk would not be "Braveheart with Panzers", too much space with roughly 3000 tanks- what would constitute the set ? Western Kansas ?), computer animation is a real possibility. ¶ 7:17 PM
The movie Downfall sparked some enthusiastic responses in the comments section. Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz reviewed Downfall in some detail back in April of 2005. An excerpt:
"The Third Reich was hammered into the dirt once and for all sixty years ago this month. To celebrate this most fortunate turn of events, I went to see the movie Downfall. (Incidentally the Amazon reviews are very good and worth looking at if you want to know more about the movie.) My short version: It is a 4.5 star movie. Brilliant acting, sets, costumes -- impeccable. Bruno Ganz is a very convincing Hitler. The films is shown mainly from the point of view of Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, played by a talented and beautiful actress Alexandra Maria Lara, which is an effective way to tell the tale. It loses half a star because the battle scenes, raved about by other reviewers, struck me as inadequate. Mostly people running across rubble-strewn streets and diving to the ground as shells come down. We get only one T-34/85 tank? And we see Hitler pinning an Iron Cross on a kid for killing two Soviet tanks with a panzerfaust, but we don't see him do it. This is just not sufficient. The capture of Berlin was the crescendo of the Soviet war effort, and this movie conveys nothing of the vastness of what was going on. The people who made this movie should have spent the money to have at least one scene with swarms of Soviet tanks, or a duel between tanks and anti-tank guns, or something. Film-makers used to know how to make massive war movies that were appropriate in scale to their grand themes. They don't want to spend the money anymore, alas. These are decadent times we are living in. (Where are Lord Lew Grade or Darryl F. Zanuck when you need them?) But this quibble aside, this is far and away the best of the three Hitler-in-the-Bunker movies. You must go see it. "
Lex's post makes me think that while reenacting the scale of major WWII battles on the Eastern Front would be prohibitively costly with live actors and 1:1 replica tanks( Kursk would not be "Braveheart with Panzers", too much space with roughly 3000 tanks- what would constitute the set ? Western Kansas ?), computer animation is a real possibility. ¶ 7:17 PM
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Thanks for the excerpt.
I agree that a full-sized rerun of Kursk would not be do-able -- though maybe there would be enough room in, say, Kazakhstan. Still, I recently watched A Bridge Too Far, which I had not seen since I saw it at the Westgate Mall in Brockton, Massachusetts, the day it came out. I was in elementary school, but I knew what I liked. The battle scenes in that one are pretty damn cool. The scenes with many (dozens) of real DC-3s with buys parachuting out of them are unspeakably cool. So much better than the computer generated scene of the night drop in Band of Brothers, as cool as that was. The scenes of the armor v. anti-tank gun fighting were also good. Lots and lots of real Sherman tanks roaring along.
We are still a long way from having computer generated scenes that are fully convincing.
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I agree that a full-sized rerun of Kursk would not be do-able -- though maybe there would be enough room in, say, Kazakhstan. Still, I recently watched A Bridge Too Far, which I had not seen since I saw it at the Westgate Mall in Brockton, Massachusetts, the day it came out. I was in elementary school, but I knew what I liked. The battle scenes in that one are pretty damn cool. The scenes with many (dozens) of real DC-3s with buys parachuting out of them are unspeakably cool. So much better than the computer generated scene of the night drop in Band of Brothers, as cool as that was. The scenes of the armor v. anti-tank gun fighting were also good. Lots and lots of real Sherman tanks roaring along.
We are still a long way from having computer generated scenes that are fully convincing.
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: Friday, 09 June, 2006
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