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Showing posts with the label Mel Gibson

'We Were Soldiers' movie review

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(C) 2002 Paramount Pictures “We Were Soldiers” (2002) Directed by Randall Wallace Written by Randall Wallace, based on the book We Were Soldiers Once...And Young, by Hal Moore and Joseph L. Galloway Starring: Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe,  Sam Elliott, Greg Kinnear, Chris Klein, Keri Russell, Barry Pepper Joe Galloway : [ narrating ] We who have seen war, will never stop seeing it. In the silence of the night, we will always hear the screams. So this is our story, for we were soldiers once, and young. “We Were Soldiers,” writer-director Randall Wallace's 2002 feature film about the three-day Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, is one of the best movies about America's "lost crusade" in Southeast Asia. . Based on Lt. Gen. Harold B. Moore and Joseph Galloway's non-fiction book We Were Soldiers Once....and Young, Wallace's film version is a realistic and respectful account of the first major battle between U.S. and North Vietnamese

One of Australian history's tragic but inspirational episodes is the backdrop for Peter Weir's Gallipoli

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Although Mel Gibson's self-destructive behavior over the past decade or so may be ushering in a premature end to his days as a Hollywood star, there's no denying that the man has had considerable success as both an actor and filmmaker ever since he began his acting career in Australian television back in the late 1970s. One of Gibson's earliest co-starring roles on his way to stardom was 1981's  Gallipoli,  Peter Weir's somber look at the experiences of Australian soldiers during World War I as they fight and suffer horrendous casualties in the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of 1915. Weir, who wrote the story on which David Williamson's screenplay is based, doesn't set out to give the Gallipoli Campaign - which was devised by a young Winston Churchill as a way to knock Turkey out of the war and give the Allies unfettered access to the Black Sea - the traditional "recreation of a major battle" treatment a la  The Longest Day  or  A Brid