A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 1998 Dreamworks Records. Movie poster art (C) 1998 Dreamworks SKG John Williams' score for Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg's searing World War II drama about eight U.S. soldiers ordered to rescue a paratrooper whose three brothers lost their lives in combat, follows the simple-is-better-than-operatic format that made his music for 1993's Schindler's List powerful and effective. Considering that most of Williams' film scores tend to be very bombastic and energetic (his Star Wars and Indiana Jones music tends to follow the Wagner/Korngold tradition of big orchestras and action-oriented cues), it's refreshing to hear this very prolific (and much-imitated) composer use orchestral restraint where he might have been tempted to utilize strident and Sousa-like marches, as is common in most war movies set during World War II. But starting with the reverent-yet-mournful Hymn to the Fallen (a piece that is not heard till the End Credits, but ...

“There’s a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn’t a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.” — Barbara Kingsolver If 1993's Schindler's List was director Steven Spielberg's soul-searching and ultimately redemptive examination of why we fought the war, then 1998's Saving Private Ryan is the emotional bookend that depicts the sacrifices made by citizen-soldiers who put their lives on hold -- and often lost them -- to save the world from becoming a charnel-house ruled by Adolf Hitler and his Axis partners. It is  a powerful and graphic film that has, in retrospect, reawakened our nation's interest in World War II and made us realize, however belatedly, how m...

With less than six months to go before Mark Hamill returns to the big screen as Luke Skywalker in Rian Johnson's "Star Wars - Episode VIII: The Last Jedi," it's worth noting that the actor has played other roles in films with much lower profiles, including "Corvette Summer" and "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia." Hamill, now 67, is best known as George Lucas's farmboy-turned-Jedi Knight in the original "Star Wars" trilogy, but his career never reached the same lofty levels as his co-star Harrison Ford's. While Ford became an in-demand leading man as Indiana Jones and Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Hamill's best-known film appearance beyond the "Star Wars" saga is probably Private Griff in Sam Fuller's World War II drama "The Big Red One." Written and directed by the crusty Fuller, "The Big Red One" is not a Hollywood-style all-star extravaganza. Other than Hamill, "The Big...

Miramax Films Director John Dahl’s “The Great Raid” is a World War II film that is in turns an old-fashioned war movie and a realistic depiction of a military action that actually took place. Written by Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, “The Great Raid” depicts a successful U.S.-Filipino raid in early 1945 on a Japanese prisoner of war (POW) camp to free 500 American survivors of 1942’s infamous Bataan Death March. Based on the books  The Great Raid on Cabanatuan  by William Breuer and  Ghost Soldiers  by Hampton Sides, “The Great Raid” stars Benjamin Bratt, Connie Nielsen, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Marton Csokas, Motoki Kobayashi, Gotaro Tsunashima, Sam Worthington, and Dale Dye. “The Great Raid” starts on a gruesome note by depicting the massacre of American POWs by Japanese forces on the island of Palawan in late 1944. The Japanese were not signatories of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, and their military code,...