Saving Private Ryan is on,.

[Wyatt Earp]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

erwin wrote:

SSpielberg.

Harsh.

[Guest]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

I really like your post, Lyra, and this is an interesting thread in general, but I think the film is ultimately unworthy of such discussion. Spielberg simply isnt the kind of filmmaker whose work invites or withstands this kind of intellectual scrutiny. I think he's a brilliant cinematic technician who is a raving genius at dreaming up indelible images and I'm absolutely certain that Private Ryan got made only because he had a vision of the opening sequence and wanted a film to hang it on, same way as CE3K and Raiders and Jaws basically flow from cinematic block to cinematic block. Peter Benchley called him "the greatest 2nd unit director in America", which is probably the most insightful thing ever said about his work (and I certainly wouldnt take it as the criticism that Stevey probably did). But sometime in the early 1980's he got obsessed with this thing about not winning an oscar and not being recognised as an 'artist' (and the oscar thing was a bit naughty, like they could see that witholding it was making him cry and they were enjoying it cos he had every other plaudit) and he started moving out of pure Barnum-esque spectacle and into middlebrow, softly-philosophical David Lean-style event movies (even on his worst day, though, Spielberg is a hundred times better than the awful Lean - I cant ever imagine Steve being as self-indulgent as to make his crew sit around for six months while he shot sunsets), for which he was/is completely unsuited, but these are the kind of pictures that are deemed 'important' enought to bring in the statues. Tell me that the man is taking a crack at War of the Worlds or he's bringing back Indy and I'm there like a shot, but talk to me about him dealing with the causes and ethics of terrorism or the black lesbian experience and I'm staying away in droves.

I'm not saying he's dumb - no way, definitely not, he's a profoundly smart cookie - but he's wasting his talent on worthiness. As for Private Ryan, its no better or more insightful or important than, say, The Bridge at Remagen or Pork Chop Hill, both of which I enjoy on a rainy Sunday, but William Goldman isnt devoting pages to them.

[jason voorhees]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

What do I think ? It's not that good.

I wish there was more Sizemore, less Giovanni Ribisi and Matt Damon, and no sun-bleached American flags. Speilberg simply never had a good handle on Generation X, save for his best film Catch Me If You Can.

It just never sat well with me.

William Goldman clearly stated his admiration for Speilberg, which would indicate he absoluteky does not have it out for him.

[Guest]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

I'm sorry, but I don't remember a single "sun-bleached" American flag.

[NickSTFU]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

"The Thin Red Line" is a much better film, just my opinion mind.

That film deserved an Oscar or two, I think it was nominated for 5 or 6. It did win some other awards though at film festivals.

[hobbes]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

Dear god, The Thin Red Line is the single most boring film in the history of cinema.
I'd rather watch Pearl fucking Harbour (a film that I took out of the DVD player and threw out of the window 45 minutes in) than ever have to sit through that pompous, pretentious pile of yawnsome cack ever again.

[Kurt Bafokeng]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

The elephant in the room of course, the one no one dares to talk about is Schindler's List.

[De Geas Clean Linen]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

Spielberg gave us genetically engineered dinosaurs and a giant shark. He's alright in my book...

[Guest]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

I really love The Thin Red Line. I think it's marvellous.

[NickSTFU]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

hobbes wrote:

Dear god, The Thin Red Line is the single most boring film in the history of cinema.
I'd rather watch Pearl fucking Harbour (a film that I took out of the DVD player and threw out of the window 45 minutes in) than ever have to sit through that pompous, pretentious pile of yawnsome cack ever again.

Not a fan then.

Depends on how you prefer your "war" films I guess.

The fella who wrote the book actually served during WW2 and is based on his experiences, so comes his own perspective.

Conflict focuses the mind, makes you more aware of your surroundings, makes you think of your loved ones in ways you wouldn't think possible, is 95% boredom and 5% sheer fucking shit your pants terror.

Portrayed well in the "Thin Red Line" I thought.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

This is really the weediest slating of a film ever.

Those first 20 mins or so of SPR are absolutely terrifying ... whoever the actors are.

The fact that it might get a bit slow later is neither here nor there.

Shame on you, now-less-than-mighty Kulbegog.

I'm sorry Erwin, but the movie was so shit that I just had to stop watching it. and I've watched Cat people from beginning to end.

People keep talking about the opening scene, but that is one of the huge problems with this movie. It's a real shithouse of a movie, but you're supposed to have been so impressed by the technical magic of the battle scene to get over the fact that the rest of the movie is dreadful bollocks.

But one of the oldest rule of hollywood is that 10 years down the road, your special effects will look awful so the rest of the movie better stand the tests of time.

I mean you just know that jaws was only such a good movie, because he couldn't get the fucking mechanical shark to work. So the shark became a scarcely seen brooding presence, and the rest of the story had to be stronger. You just know that if spielberg could have got the fucker working, he'd have had it jumping out of toilets, driving a car, and the movie would have been about a crummy mechanical shark.

This is the other thing. The first twenty minutes have lost most of their impact. Firstly You see back inthe day the bit where the hillbilly in the bell tower uses his natural hillbilly skill of being able to shoot the eye out of a squirrel as it jumps from branch to branch, to kill loads of germans. That looks a lot less impressive when you've played the Medal of Honor series, or wiped out scores of germans with your sniper rifle in return to castle wolfenstein.

Similarly it's difficult for a the first part to have much impact any more when your flatmate spends several hours at a time playing call of duty modern warfare on XBox live. I'm not suggesting that these games have desensitized me to violence, but that they have desensitized me to artistic depictions of violence.

He objects to Damon's ugly tree monologue, for example. I always seen that scene as a clear subversion of war movie clichés- where instead of coming up with a long and moving speech about his home town and his family, he comes with something moronic and immature, betraying his tender years.

But that's largely why it doesn't work. It's like putting deliberate post-modern Irony in the middle of Ben hur, or gone with the wind. The rest of the movie is full of the most horrendously sappy bollocks, then either you go all the way with it, or you make a movie that subverts movie cliches.

Here we are wandering across northern france on a fools errand, and when we meet the guy they're supposed to rescue, we discover that the dead ryan boys are actually the sorts of cunts who are into coercing sex from marginal members of society, and witless arson. You're not subverting a cliche, you're just making the whole fucking movie pointless. By making Ryan out to be such an unthinking cunt basically you lose whatever you had going for you with the sappy bollocks.

If he was going to subvert cliche's, then it should have happened throughout the movie, not all of a sudden, bringing the thing to a jarring halt.

Catch me if you can is a very good movie despite having the three things that would turn me off watching a movie, spielberg, Hanks and di caprio. But most of the rest of his stuff isn't worth a shite. I have never seen schindlers list because I'm terrified how he'll handle the holocaust, I'll stick to the pianist and life is beautiful. similarly I'm probably never going to watch munich, and after road to perdition, I'm never going to watch a tom hanks movie again

[radmonkey]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

You should really watch Schindler's list. It's pretty much his best film by a mile.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

Pretty much, but not totally. He blows it big time with the ending, mostly by including himself in the final scene. Spielberg is basically a pictorial storyteller and as long as he remembers that's what he does best he makes darn good movies: Catch Me if You Can, Close Encounters, ET (for me the latter is still his best.) But he almost always falls flat on his face when he he tries to engage the viewer's intellect, rather than their emotions. A good example is "the little girl in the pink coat" in Schindler's List. She succeeds in subverting the enormously powerful "cleansing the ghetto" sequence, by reminding us we're just watching a film fercrissake. There is a time and place for playing with cinematic convention but that most definitely is not it, and even if it was Spielberg isn't the guy to do it.

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

Saving Private Ryan is on,.

The Mighty Kubelgog!!! wrote:

I don't like this bloated second in command. He's too fat to be in the army. People back then were really fucking thin. He looks like a right cunt. Who is he?

Tom hanks is looking out to sea over the thousands of dead and the sea of blood. I thought that d-day went on for a lot longer than that.

How can you not like Michael Madsen in any role, the coolest cat alive?