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Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Tropic Thunder

Tropic ThunderTropic Thunder is a 2008 American action satire comedy film directed and produced by Ben Stiller. The film stars Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey, Jr. as a group of prima donna actors making a Vietnam War film. When their frustrated writer and director decide to drop them in the middle of a jungle, the actors are forced to portray their roles without the comforts of a film set. Written by Stiller, Justin Theroux, and Etan Cohen, the film was produced by DreamWorks and Red Hour Films and distributed by Paramount Pictures.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

The Counterfeiters

The CounterfeitersThe Counterfeiters (German: Die Fälscher) is a 2007 Austrian-German film written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky. Based on the memoir by Adolf Burger, the film tells the inspiring story of a pre-World War II criminal whose cunning and fiery spirit enable him to overcome deadly odds and survive life in Germany's Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by the Nazis during the Second World War to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England currency. The film centers on a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon 'Sally' Sorowitsch, who is coerced into assisting the Nazi operation at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The film is based on a memoir written by Adolf Burger, a Jewish Slovak typographer who was imprisoned in 1942 for forging baptismal certificates to save Jews from deportation, and later interned at Sachsenhausen to work on Operation Bernhard. Ruzowitsky consulted closely with Burger through almost every stage of the writing and production. The film won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the 80th Academy Awards in 2008.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds (Single-Disc Edition)Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 war film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and released in August 2009 by The Weinstein Company and Universal Pictures. It was filmed in several locations, among them Germany and France, beginning in October 2008. The film, set in German-occupied France, tells the story of two plots to assassinate the Nazi political leadership, one planned by a young French Jewish cinema proprietress, the other by a team of American soldiers called the "Basterds".

Tarantino has said that despite it being a war film, Inglourious Basterds is a "spaghetti western but with World War II iconography". In addition to spaghetti westerns, the film also pays homage to the World War II "macaroni combat" sub-genre (itself heavily influenced by spaghetti-westerns).

Inglourious Basterds was accepted into the main selection at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival in competition for the prestigious Palme d'Or and had its world premiere there in May. It was the only U.S. film to win an award at Cannes that year, earning a Best Actor award for Christoph Waltz. It also has been nominated in four categories in the 67th Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture – Drama and Best Director for Tarantino.

Inglourious Basterds begins in German-occupied France, where Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) witnesses the execution of her family at the hand of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Shosanna narrowly escapes and flees to Paris, where she forges a new identity as the owner and operator of a cinema.

Elsewhere in Europe, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) organizes a group of Jewish soldiers to engage in targeted acts of retribution. Known to their enemy as "The Basterds," Raine's squad joins German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) on a mission to take down the leaders of The Third Reich. Fates converge under a cinema marquee, where Shosanna is poised to carry out a revenge plan of her own.

The title of the film was inspired by director Enzo Castellari's 1978 Dirty Dozen-like war film The Inglorious Bastards. Though Tarantino acknowledges that both the former and the latter were inspirations for the film, and there are noticeable similarities, he stresses that Basterds is an original work and not a remake of the 1978 film. To date, there has been little explanation of the title spelling. When asked, Tarantino would not explain the first u in Inglourious and said, "But the 'Basterds'? That's just the way you say it: Basterds." He stated in an interview that the misspelled title is "a Basquiat-esque touch." He further commented on the Late Show with David Letterman that "Inglourious Basterds" is the "Tarantino way of spelling it."

The movie received an eight to eleven minute standing ovation by the critics after its first screening at Cannes. In particular, Christoph Waltz was singled out for Cannes honors, receiving the Best Leading Actor award at the end of the festival. Movie critic Devin Faraci of Chud.com stated: "The cry has been raised long before this review, but let me continue it: Christoph Waltz needs not an Oscar nomination but rather an actual Oscar in his hands.... he must have gold". The film received four Golden Globe nominations including Best Motion Picture (Drama), Best Performance By An Actor In A Supporting Role In A Motion Picture for Christoph Waltz, Best Director (Motion Picture) for Quentin Tarantino, and Best Screenplay (Motion Picture) for Quentin Tarantino. The film also received three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations including Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, Outstanding Male Actor in a Supporting Role for Christoph Waltz, and Outstanding Female Actor in a Supporting Role for Diane Kruger.

Reference:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361748/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglourious_Basterds
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inglourious_basterds/



Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Defiance

DefianceDefiance is a 2008 war film written, produced, and directed by Edward Zwick, set during the occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany. The film is an account of the Bielski partisans, a group led by four Jewish brothers who saved and recruited Jews in the Kresy region of Poland during the Second World War. The film stars Daniel Craig as Tuvia Bielski, Liev Schreiber as Zus Bielski, Jamie Bell as Asael Bielski, and George MacKay as Aron Bielski. The film was an adaptation of Nechama Tec's book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans.

Defiance is a different kind of World War II movie, one that looks at the Holocaust from a unique angle--telling the true story of a group of Jews in Eastern Europe who fought back. Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe escape into the Belarussian forests, where they join Russian resistance fighters and endeavor to build a village in order to protect themselves and about 1,000 Jewish non-combatants.

On the run from the Germans and the local police, the three Russian Bielski brothers--Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber), and Asael (Jamie Bell)--hide out deep in the forest. Their numbers swell as more and more refugees join them, coming together to form a community while also patrolling with guns and shooting the enemy to stay alive. But Tuvia and Zus have a falling-out over what future direction to take: Tuvia thinks it best to remain in the forest despite the coming vicious winter, but Zus wants to join the Russian resistance, which is aggressively attacking the Nazis.

Complicating the situation are the women in their lives, known as forest wives--Lilka (Alexa Davalos) shows interest in Tuvia, Bella (Iben Hjelje) grows close to Zus, and young Chaya (Mia Wasikowska) and Asael flirt with the tingles of first love. As food grows scarce, diseases increase, and the Nazis become determined to find and kill them, the Bielski Otriad struggles to survive, battling back when necessary, including taking up arms.

Defiance is a powerful thriller filled with tense human emotion, a gripping story about brotherly love and the basic human instinct to survive against all odds. Craig, Schreiber and Bell are terrific as the Bielski brothers, three very different individuals who simply refuse to just lie down and die.


Friday, April 3, 2009

Lions for Lambs

Lions for Lambs is a 2007 American drama film about the connection between a platoon of United States soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. senator, a reporter, and a California college professor. It stars Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford. It was the first Cruise/Wagner Productions film since the company joined with United Artists subsequent to Cruise's falling out with Paramount Pictures in 2006.

Robert Redford directs this dramatic tale of intersecting lives that weaves together the stories of an idealistic professor's attempts to inspire a privileged student, a former student of the teacher who is wounded behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, and a congressman whose interactions with a seasoned journalist reveal much about the man behind the public persona. Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford star in a film scripted by Matthew Michael Carnahan.

With a title that alludes to incompetent leaders sending brave soldiers into the slaughter of battle, the film takes aim at the U.S. government's prosecution of the wars in the Middle East, showing three different simultaneous stories: a congressman who launches a new military strategy and details it to a journalist, two soldiers involved in said operation, and their college teacher trying to re-engage a promising student. The film was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, and directed by Redford. It was released in North America on Friday, November 9, 2007, to mixed but mostly negative reviews and disappointing box office receipts.

The film was partly based on Operation Red Wing, an unsuccessful SEAL operation in Afghanistan.