Posts Tagged ‘Saving Private Ryan’

Short Take: A harrowing story that's emotional but not sappy. Distinctly Spielbergian.

Director: Steven Spielberg

Screenwriters: Lee Hall and Richard Curtis; Michael Morpurgo (novel)

Cast: Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullen, Niels Arestrup, David Thewlis, Tom Hiddleston

Length: 2h 26m

Synopsis: It is the era of World War I. The horse of a poor farmer boy (Irvine), named Joey, is sold to the English cavalry so that his family can pay the debt on their farm. Distraught, the boy offers to enlist in the army but is too young. From then on the horse changes hands from a Captain (Hiddleston), to a grandfather (Arestrup) and his granddaughter (Celine Buckens), and a handful of others. All who find themselves in charge of the horse fall in love with it. In having so many different owners Joey ends up traveling far from his original home, and although he has affections for some of his new owners he ultimately seeks to return to the poor farmer boy who raised him. In the end, as property of the German army, Joey risks everything in a desperate charge towards English forces in the hope that he can finally find his way home. Like the soldiers who surround him, Joey demonstrates the kind of bravery that few look to prove they have. But will it be enough?

Read the rest of this entry »

With the recent release of the super patriotic Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which was no doubt strategically distributed just in time for the 4^th of July holiday, we thought it would be a good idea to try and figure out which American movie is the most patriotic. Such a question naturally leads into some healthy debating, and the more we thought about it the more difficult we found it to pinpoint which single film is more ardently loyal and proudly American than all the rest. However, with some careful thought we were able to compile the Top 5 most patriotic movies ever.

Before we list the privileged few we must first set up some conditions. For a movie to qualify for our list it had to meet three requirements: it had to portray the United States as a uniform protagonist (if only symbolically) and could not just be a story about one single American, the U.S. had to have been in opposition to some thing or other country in some way (not necessarily in terms of war, but it’s admittedly a running theme), and it had to at some point visually glorify a national symbol (with the most common example being the American flag). With these parameters now set let us get right to it! Read the rest of this entry »

What could "The Expendables" teach us, besides why you don't want to pick a fight with any of them?

Back at the beginning of Summer we gave a preview of three films that were to come out that have something in common. What these films share is a focus on a tight-knit group of ex-military soldiers who work towards a shared goal of some kind. With The Losers it was about getting revenge, with The A-Team it was about living up to one’s duties as a patriot, and with The Expendables it was about serving the human condition. As you may have noticed, the motivations of the groups got progressively nobler, from serving selfish incentives to fulfilling an intangible obligation to heroic morals; namely the moral that the strong have to protect the weak. The three movies, and by extension the three groups in these movies, may share a similar basic premise, and may interact within their respective contexts in a similar way, but their differing motivations distinguish them from each other more so than we may have anticipated. Likewise, they also shared more in common than we previously thought. What exactly, though, can we learn from comparing them further?

Read the rest of this entry »

Miramax has long been considered a haven for independent financing and distribution, but with it being limited to only a few films per year who will pick up the slack?

Every few months or so, I get into this strange mood where I think the film industry has become all hype and no substance and I feel nostalgic for the movies I used to love.  Typically during these periods, every film I see only seems to confirm that sense and I grow increasingly disappointed until something finally snaps me out of it.

This time last year, I found myself in the midst of one of my film industry doldrums and I walked into Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age film Adventureland expecting yet another gross-out teen comedy like his previous film Superbad.  However, what I encountered was a film that restored my faith in the medium.

I remember the moment exactly.  Kristen Stewart’s character Em and Jesse Eisenberg’s character James are simply driving in a car as the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” plays on the radio.  They have just left a bar after Em’s secret lover and his wife walk in and the couples share an awkward and loaded exchange.  Em is clearly thrown by the encounter and the scene that follows basically shows her reaction to it.  As she drives, Em’s face goes from sad to angry to disappointed to confused in a matter of seconds, displaying all of the complicated emotions she feels.  And it was during that scene that I remembered how much I love film and how powerful film could be.  It wasn’t just Stewart’s incredible performance or the music choice or the way Mottola filmed it, it was the combination of all those things.  It was the realization that I was seeing a truly extraordinary moment of creation happening on the screen and I had suddenly regained that passion for movies I had experienced as a child.

I’ve recently felt myself moving toward another bout of movie despondency so I popped in my Adventureland DVD and prepared to have my faith restored.  On a whim, I watched the previews before the film and one of them happened to be a roundup of Miramax films, the same company that distributed Adventureland.

As the preview rolled, I realized how many Miramax films I’ve enjoyed throughout the years.  I mean, this is the production/distribution company that first sparked my love for movies all the way back in 1996 with the release of Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient.  I may not have fully understood all the film’s themes at eight years old, but I certainly appreciated the beauty.  The passionate yet tragic love story of the central characters and the gorgeous cinematography are the reasons the film remains one of my favorites even today.  Miramax was the company that sparked my love of musicals too.  Sitting in a half-empty theater in the middle of the day watching Chicago was a positively transformative experience.  The sex appeal and the combination of stage performance and cinema that only film could supply was positively incredible.  Miramax was even the company that taught me about post-modernist referencing: I delighted in the way Wes Craven’s Scream deconstructed the horror genre and was positively astounded by the endless layers of pop culture reference Quentin Tarantino used in the Kill Bill films.  So I began to wonder, what happened to Miramax?

Miramax began some thirty years ago in New York as an independent production and distribution company founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein.  The goal of the company—named for the Weinsteins’ parents Miriam and Max—was to produce and distribute independent films which were often more notable for their artistic value than their potential box office earnings.  Between their opening in 1979 and 1993, Miramax distributed such films as Sex, Lies and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs.  However, it really began to flourish after the Walt Disney Company bought it in 1993.  After the sale, with more financial backing at their disposal, the Weinsteins were able to run the company fairly independently of the rest of the Disney family.

The Weinsteins had always been fairly aggressive in their business practices, from acquiring films to acquiring promising filmmaking talent, and that same style carried over in their Disney period.  Nowhere was this aggressive business style more apparent than the company’s Oscar campaigns.  Perhaps the best example of a successful Miramax campaign came in 1998 when Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for a Best Picture Oscar.  According to a New York Magazine article from 1995, Miramax spent an estimated $5 million campaigning for the film and its arguable whether it would have been so fortunate without such significant backing.  Miramax carried on in this manner with one successful Oscar-winning film after another.  And then 2005 rolled around.

The Weinsteins had a tenuous relationship with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner over issues like financing and creative matters and when it came time to renew the brothers’ contracts in 2005, the negotiations went so poorly they ultimately decided to leave to create The Weinstein Company.  Miramax continued relatively unchanged under the direction of Daniel Battsek until this past January when Disney closed the its New York and Los Angeles offices and made it a part of the larger Disney infrastructure, thereby reducing the production output to only a handful of films per year.  Though companies like Summit Entertainment and even The Weinstein Company have showed interest in purchasing Miramax from Disney, it’s likely the $700 million asking price, as reported by The Deal Magazine, will mean the company will stay in Disney’s possession for years to come.  However, the real question in all this madness is what company can audiences expect to take up the creative slack?

Miramax’s most obvious heir is The Weinstein Company.  In it’s few short years, it has already made some impressive films like quite a few of this year’s Oscar nominees including Inglourious Basterds, Nine and A Single Man.  And it has quite a few promising films in the pipeline including two Sundance Favorites, The Company Men starring Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper and Blue Valentine starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.  However, another independent company that might give the Weinsteins a run for their money is Summit Entertainment.  Former Paramount Vice Chairman Robert G. Friedman and Patrick Wachsberger established Summit in April 2007, but it’s already shown some promise.  It produced and distributed this year’s Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker and with the cash cow that is The Twilight Saga as one of its properties, Summit shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon.

Regardless of what the future may hold, I’m sure there will always be films to help remind me why I fell in love with the medium in the firs place.  And if not, I can always pick something from the Miramax library for a little reminder.