A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Pros:  Great cast; well-written screenplay; lots of action in third act Cons:  Unflinching look at war's violence, but not as graphic as modern war films The Dirty Dozen (1967) All art, as writer-director Nicholas Meyer ( The Seven Percent Solution, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ) has observed in several of his Star Trek- related audio commentaries for home video, is a reflection of the time in which its conceived.  One can, for instance, look at a painting by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn and one by Pablo Picasso and tell right away that one was done in the 17th Century and that the other was created in the 20th. As such, movies – no matter what genre they may fit in – tend to reflect the social, cultural and political environments of the times in which they are made.  Not only in simple terms of cinematic techniques and casts – a film such as  Casablanca is clearly identified as a 1940s-era film because it’s in black-and-white, it sta...

Pros:  None Cons:  Awful screenplay, historical inaccuracies abound, laughable performances, tepid directing. On December 16, 1944, elements of three German armies -- 14 infantry and five panzer divisions in all -- attacked part of the American First Army along an 80-mile front along Germany's border with Belgium and Luxembourg. The sudden and unexpected counteroffensive hit the Americans in an area the Allies thought would be a nice, quiet sector for combat-weary divisions to rest and refit while green divisions fresh from the States could be acclimated to life on the line: the dark and deep forests of the Ardennes. Planned and ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, this massive onslaught was launched with one objective in mind: penetrate the American lines, pass through the "impassable" Ardennes Forest, cross the Meuse River, and capture the vital port of Antwerp. At the very least, the Allied supply situation would deteriorate enough to slow the Anglo-American ...

Pros:  Everything. Cons:  None. Ramsey: Colonel Von Luger, it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they cannot escape, then it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability.  After more than a decade of trying to get a studio to film a movie based on Paul Brickhill's book  The Great Escape,  John Sturges finally got backing from the Mirisch Company to recreate the true-life story of Allied officers escaping from a German POW camp in 1944. While the screenplay by W. Burnett and James ( Shogun ) Clavell fictionalizes the characters and compresses events to fit a feature film's running time, the details of the escape attempt are true-to-life. Even better, the film was actually shot in Germany (even the thickest wooded areas in California don't come close to resembling the Black Fore...

Although the average film-goer may not be aware of this, some of Hollywood’s best films are often inspired by movies made in other countries, such as those directed by Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, whose  Rashomon, The Hidden Fortress  and  Yojimbo  inspired American films such as  The Outrage, Star Wars  and  Last Man Standing.  (Kurosawa’s  Yojimbo,  in particular, was also the somewhat controversial template for Sergio Leone’s  A Fistful of Dollars , but  Last Man Standing  is an officially sanctioned remake.)  Perhaps one of the most popular Americanized remakes of a Kurosawa “Easterner” is 1960’s  The Magnificent Seven,  a Western written by William Roberts and officially acknowledged (in the main title sequence) as being inspired by Toho Films’  Seven Samurai  (1954)   .  That  Seven Samurai  could be adapted fairly easily from a film set in a medieval Japanese setting ...