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cissycricket
Reviews
The Longest Day (1962)
too many stories
i grew up on this movie; my cousins and i would pile our GI Joes around the warm glow of the television to watch it on Sunday night and Monday night, since ABC couldn't show it all at one time... and we loved it. it gave us endless scenarios for our fearless troops to play out in the days to come, until the movie faded into memory (at least until the next airing!). then we got educated. we learned history, we read more books, we saw other films, and realized that not many of the men landing on the beaches were Robert Mitchum's age; not many Paratroops were John Wayne's age; most of them were barely out of their teens and not much older than we were in high school. it doesn't pack the visceral punch of the first 24 minutes of SPR, but it does cover MUCH more material in trade. i still watch TLD (i have it on VHS) but wish it could have been broken into more informative, fewer scenarios. i don't mind the odd cameos (Connery's was not truly a cameo; he still was a relative newcomer to stardom) and enjoy Germans speaking German.
The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
the retaking of Pelham 1 2 3
i love Travolta. Denzel too, especially when he's playing imperfect, flawed characters. Gandolfini actually CAN act, it seems. Turturro is as always excellent. then there's the STORY... which is where it all falls down. the original film was claustrophobic, cold, and quietly menacing. changing Walter Garber from a capable TA cop to a disgraced TA official was acceptable; changing Shaw into Ryder was a mistake. Travolta can do quiet mean; he can do seething, under the surface psychotic, why didn't he do it here? the original film had an escape plan; in the remake, the bad guys don't even BOTHER to try and change their appearance as they exit the subway. no wonder the two disposable baddies get blown to bits by NYPD. without Ryder, they have no brain. that said, even Ryder could maybe have DITCHED the leather trench coat and shaved off his goatee...
Field of Honor (1986)
the Dutch Battalion needed a hero
but McGill's character wasn't the guy they were looking for. If this movie was supposed to show how his Sgt Sire went from drunken violent lout to caring protective father figure, it fails. Sire is, in my opinion, responsible for the near total destruction of his platoon due to his planning a drunken party at the front lines, during which Red Chinese troops infiltrate and ambush them. even the small amount of redemption he awards himself by saving a Korean girl whom he'd pressed into prostitution earlier, along with her young brother shocked into silence, isn't enough to make up for having to execute his own friend burned horribly in the attack. there had to be a better story than this to exemplify the exploits of the Dutch Battalion.