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Showing posts with the label Jim Brown

Movie Review: 'The Dirty Dozen'

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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 stars actors who were promin

'Ice Station Zebra' movie review: I have a sinking feeling about this.....

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Ice Station Zebra (1968) Directed by John Sturges Screenplay by Douglas Heyes, Harry Julian Fink, and W.R. Burnett, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean Starring: Rock Hudson, Patrick MacGoohan, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown John Sturges'  Ice Station Zebra , based on Alistair MacLean's novel and written by Douglas Heyes Harry Julian Fink, and W.R. Burnett, is a Cold War-era "restoring the balance of power" film.  It focuses on a mixed bag of Navy and Marine personnel, a Russian defector, and a mysterious British agent on a risky mission to the Arctic Circle to retrieve the contents of a crashed Soviet spy satellite's cameras.  On paper, this 1968 technothriller looks promising, considering it features a U.S. nuclear sub (the USS  Tigerfish ), a noteworthy cast (Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick MacGoohan, and ex-football great Jim Brown), and one of those race-the-Russians-to-the-gizmo plots that would later be the heart of such novels as