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Battle of Long Tan movie to begin filming


smithcorp

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i am discussing the scenes of that movie that were relevant to what i'm talking about (that is, the dive bombing scenes on the evacuating british)- i'm not talking about the entire picture from beginning to end and the merits of its story, if i were, then you'd have a valid point.

 

as much as there is to criticize about saving private ryan, from the standpoint of technical achievement, it's not been surpassed, the war drama peeked with that film as the high water mark and was never surpassed. i think it set the bar too high. you can say that is merely my opinion, but there are objective measures to back up my opinion. no war movie as won an academy award for best picture since- this is interesting because as far as i know there is no cgi used anywhere in saving private ryan, it's all practical effects and done with a very simple idea of using first person point of view hand held shaky cameras rather a lot of these dramatic tracking shots. score was more appropriate to the era, either popular music from the time (edith piaf records), or a more classical overture. quite honestly i don't hear a lot of talk among mainstream audiences for the more recent war films lately, i think there is this sense that they aren't really that good.

 

i tapped out of watching movies about 5 years ago or so- they've all become so standard, watching war movies or watching a movie like the sci fi adventure edge of tomorrow have been for me almost the same types of films. i get that maybe non us audiences are interested in films that depict other nationalities, because us centric films are quite common but not not as relevant to them- i get all that. the problem is that film medium itself is by and large a lot of stock cliches, recognizeable manipulation attempts and quite safe subject matter, notwithstanding the decision to depict a battle not from the us perspective.

 

 

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Look, I don't discuss the merits of a film based on a trailer. If a trailer fails to generate interest in the film it promotes, that's fair enough. At the same time throwing in a film like Dunkirk to support your argument when by your own admission you have watched maybe five minutes out of 106 undermines your position rather than reinforcing it, is all I'm saying.

 

Directing films already is a difficult job, when you have a hundred hands tugging the shirt of the director. The producers have a vision, the scriptwriter, the actors, the director, the camera man, ... and directing war movies raises the difficulties by a considerable margin bercause of the conflicting requirements. Next, the film is supposed to return a profit, and then of course the most competent directors are all sitting in the audience. That's not to say you can't citicize a film for its failures. And it's not like the points you raised are entirely without merit.

But the sole purpose of a trailer is to generate the maximal audience that a film can get. As such, it will usually be created in a way to speak to people with a lot of different expectations (of which the rivet counters are, economically speking, a negligible quantity - a war movie is no contribution to history science, but first and foremost a commercial endeavor). Criticizing a film for trying to maximize its audience is like scolding a dog for sniffing pee at a street corner - you're applying the wrong standards. Yes, movies are also an art form, but first and foremost they are intended to be rented out as entertainment for hire. So good entertainers do what entertainers must, they play to the audience's expectations. Or at least to what the marketing experts tell the producers what the audience's expectations are.

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4 minutes ago, Captain_Colossus said:

as much as there is to criticize about saving private ryan, from the standpoint of technical achievement, it's not been surpassed, the war drama peeked with that film as the high water mark and was never surpassed.

If you mean the 20 minutes of the initial beach landing, and maybe the final five, I wouldn't protest.

The film as a whole isn't really bad but there are a lot of really questionable elements in it, especially the sniper vs sniper scene, or the absurdly long time it took the German machine gunners to change barrels (which I would have forgiven were it not that the whole story hinges on that scene).

 

Quote

no war movie as won an academy award for best picture since- this is interesting because as far as i know there is no cgi used anywhere in saving private ryan, it's all practical effects and done with a very simple idea of using first person point of view hand held shaky cameras rather a lot of these dramatic tracking shots.

An interesting factoid, but I think that's mere coincidence. There aren't very many war films that won "best picture" academy awards to begin with because most of them aren't very good films in comparison to your run of the mill drama because the run of the mill drama is much easier to tell for reasons already outlined. (Another question could be asked if Academy Awards actually are the adequate metric to measure success, given that they are mostly the film industry's way to dispense attaboys to film industry insiders; that's not to say that the recipients didn't deserve it but it's an open secret that Academy decisions are often heavily influenced by factors other than pure merit of avhievement.)

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all the combat scenes from dunkirk have been uploaded to youtube and you can watch them- i watched them all. if you remove those, you might have a good drama remaining with good characters and dialogue and period costumes and all that- i don't know, but i do know the war scenes were like watching paint dry. i did see all of those, that is the point i am using as a comparison.

 

now it's true that there are all kinds of politics that go on with academy awards, everyone knows that is so. a comedy would never win an award for best picture, there is no way you will see that ever happen, it's like an unspoken rule, so i get all that too. but honestly, do you think that the recent film era is really churning out really awesome films in your experience? i tend to find some thing to like in every genre- horror, comedy, whatever, but it really is all looking the same to me. the film industry is tired. even box office sales are coming down in favor of streaming, with cable released programming evidently overtaking the movie houses (game of thrones, etc. etc. - which btw i've never seen to comment on it). i make the comparison once that the home console market could compete with the arcade machine experience on the same technical level, arcade games became largely obsolete

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Just so we're all on the same page, "Best Picture" Academy Awards winners:

Absentees are, among others, "Waterloo", "Zulu", "Tora! Tora! Tora!", "Blackhawk Down", "We Were Soldiers Once...", "Siege of Jadotville" which I would rate among the better war movies.

 

"The Hurt Locker" I didn't like since it didn't actually have much to do with defusing IEDs, "The English Patient" is a stretch in this list (but not a bad film), "Platoon" was okay-ish, "The Deer Hunter" was an excellent film about PTSD and prisoners of war, but not about fighting; "Patton" wouldn't win again these days even if all the M48s were replaced by original Panthers and Sherman tanks. "Lawrence of Arabia" was an excellent film but the war itself was more of a backdrop; "River Kwai" is entertaining but even less of a war film than "The Deer Hunter". I haven't seen "Wings" but it doesn't sound as if I would like it, which leaves "All Quiet on the Western Front" as the one film that works both as a good film and as one that has pretty decent depiction of the brutal trench warfare.

"The Longest Day" is an example of an ambitious war film project that failed to be a good film. It's okay-ish but not brilliant. In a similar category, "The Battle of Britain". "Das Boot" works very well as a TV series; as a film in the cinema - not so much. Speaking of TV series, "Band of Brothers" was good (though with some historical deficits), "The Pacific" was IMO actually much better (but failed to engage the audience as much, simply due to the fact that it switched from a single company to an entire division, and from a trail from Normandy to Austria to cover the biggest ocean of this planet). Still, I learned to appreciate it much more after reading the "Chesty" biography, and then re-watching it.

 

So, where are we now. If you don't like films in general - noted, but then there isn't much left to discuss. We could discuss the merits of certain films such as "Dunkirk" based purely on cinematography, we could agree in our disappointment with a film like "Fury". We could have a look at films of the past that we watched in their entirety. I'll refrain from judging "Danger Close" until after I've given it a thorough viewing.

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i didn't know about the hurt locker. so my memory goes back to saving private ryan as the last academy war winner. out of the list, i would barely call the deer hunter a war movie- maybe i'm not the person with the authority to do that, but in my view that was not a war film, it's a drama set during the vietnam war- an usual drama at that, but there is so little in the way of the film that had anything to do with combat, and it's more the leading up to that and the time after that the time film is focused on. i agree that not all of them are good- patton didn't interest me that much, nor did the longest day, there's only a handful on that list that i liked at all. i don't want to get too much into that, but, maybe i'm getting old and cynicism sets in, but i usually have thought most films weren't that good, including a lot of academy award winners.

 

here's my take based on this trailer, of course i have nothing else to go on. but trailers are designed by their nature to catch your attention to make you want to see it. based on the advertising, i don't like what i see. if a lot of 1980s movie trailers basically give away the entire plot (go back and watch a lot of them how much they do this), the modern film trailers in their way can be indicative of what the actual movie will be when you see enough of them. i thought fury was going to be a stinker based on the trailer, there were cues in it based on the trailer but i went and saw it anyway, and it didn't give me any surprises. the very fact that the trailer for danger close trailer opened up trying to manipulate you with something used in every other movie score trying to set a mood already turned me off. you hear that singing voice : "woooohoooooohoooooo" this stuff sickens me, and it can be used in any film. . then from the opening attempt at manipulation, it's just as predictable. have you noticed how in film scores they will play this low key music which cuts out and stops- that's when you know something dramatic is about to happen- there you go, something happened and the bullets start flying. you've seen this before. over. and over and over. different story, different movie, same scene. honestly, what i see now are just anatomies of how films are put together, cliche film techniques rather than films these days. when i watch  a movie, i am watching techniques on how movies are made, rather than watching the movies as something seamless- i see the director's intent too much, too much do i see what they are doing and i'm never brought into it. that is also why movies like tropic thunder were parodies of the stereotypical action film and the film industry in general, and you've seen similar self aware types of spoof elsewhere. they parodies of how lazy and complacent the industry can be.

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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@Captain_Colossus I get where you're coming from I think - there's plenty of war movie tropes that are cliched and overused but I suspect they are helpful to get across emotion, scale or the horror of war to a varied audience, so that's why they are overused. It must be hard for a director to avoid them because the producers want to minimise risk and they use test audiences that are so used to movie story structure that they demand these tropes be used so they don't have to think too much. And when a movie like SPR introduces new tropes - handheld shaky cam and extreme closeups to communicate the chaos of the beach landing for instance - other movies grab the effective ones.

 

It annoys me sometimes too, like people in movies hanging up phones and not saying goodbye, lazy jump scares in horror flicks and people staring at themselves in bathroom mirrors. The Thin Red Line's spiritual, poetical voiceover i thought worked really well in that film to show a sensitive soldier's torment, but it pisses me off when other movies have used it, because I think its insincere and lazy.

 

That said, Long Tan is a real-world struggle of a small force against a much larger one using human wave attacks, with liberal artillery keeping the enemy off, so there's not much room for the director to move if he wants to remain true to the story (and that will be very important to Australians and Kiwis). If you want to see a Vietnam war movie that is pretty free of tropes I can recommend The Odd Angry Shot (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079652/). Others here may disagree but I like it a lot.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Just saw it - Outstanding.

 

Ovation from the audience at the end (a bit biased as the auditorium was full of people with sensible haircuts).

 

Only saw one glaring continuity error LTCOL Townsend wearing COL rank.

 

I intend to watch it again at a Veterans Affairs sponsored screening.

 

Edited by Gibsonm
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1 hour ago, Gibsonm said:

Just saw it - Outstanding.

 

Ovation from the audience at the end (a bit biased as the auditorium was full of people with sensible haircuts).

 

Only saw one glaring continuity error LTCOL Townsend wearing COL rank.

 

I intend to watch it again at a Veterans Affairs sponsored screening.

 

Did they get enough M113 to get some decent cav action into the movie??

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 4/30/2019 at 8:11 PM, Gibsonm said:

 

Most non Australians or Kiwis probably wouldn't get the humour though. ;)

 

I think the present for the Padre scene (no spoilers!) must be far and away the funniest scene in any war film I have ever seen.  The Odd Angry Shot is a really brilliant film, all round. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Stumbled across this podcast called "Principles of War" which includes a series of interviews with Dave Sabben (12 platoon commander) about Long Tan and the lead-up to it. You can apparently even get your PME qualifications up by listening to it. :)

 

https://theprinciplesofwar.com/long-tan/23-long-tan-1-readiness-conscription-and-the-nashos/

 

 

Edited by smithcorp
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