Sell The House, Sell the Car, Sell the Children and Defy the very Storm King Himself, but for the love of Ghod PLEASE see "Stalingrad" (2013) a new Russian film whose devotion to bombast brought tears to my eyes!
Truly only a member of the Bondarchuk Family, one Fedor Bondarchuk, could direct a film this unsubtle!
For surely, didn't Sergei Bondarchuk, Fedor's father once make my favorite war film of all time? "Waterloo" (1970) starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte in a performance that eschewed scenery chewing in favor of swallowing the sets whole.
But Stalingrad ahh Stalingrad, not a single original line, character or set up in one hundred and thirty one minutes as predictable as a stopped clock, for surely there is virtue in connecting the dots The Right Way.
And that is Stalingrad's saving grace, it is confidently asserts all the old shibboleths and dresses them up with all the CGI, gore and carnage as the market can bear.
And what the hell, the performances are all first rate, the women in particular Mariya Smolnikova & Yanina Studilina stand out.
As the last of the combatants of that war are summoned to The Final Muster, there is a emotional need to revisit the ancient truths and cherished cliches...and there is some strange attraction to the Second World War, has any other war within or without living memory spawned so many movies? Virtually every single major or minor battle therein has been memorialized via film adaptation.
I mean top that, Spanish American War....
Saturday, March 01, 2014
Stalingrad (2013)
Sell The House, Sell the Car, Sell the Children and Defy the very Storm King Himself, but for the love of Ghod PLEASE see "Stalingrad" (2013) a new Russian film whose devotion to bombast brought tears to my eyes!
Truly only a member of the Bondarchuk Family, one Fedor Bondarchuk, could direct a film this unsubtle!
For surely, didn't Sergei Bondarchuk, Fedor's father once make my favorite war film of all time? "Waterloo" (1970) starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte in a performance that eschewed scenery chewing in favor of swallowing the sets whole.
But Stalingrad ahh Stalingrad, not a single original line, character or set up in one hundred and thirty one minutes as predictable as a stopped clock, for surely there is virtue in connecting the dots The Right Way.
And that is Stalingrad's saving grace, it is confidently asserts all the old shibboleths and dresses them up with all the CGI, gore and carnage as the market can bear.
And what the hell, the performances are all first rate, the women in particular Mariya Smolnikova & Yanina Studilina stand out.
As the last of the combatants of that war are summoned to The Final Muster, there is a emotional need to revisit the ancient truths and cherished cliches...and there is some strange attraction to the Second World War, has any other war within or without living memory spawned so many movies? Virtually every single major or minor battle therein has been memorialized via film adaptation.
I mean top that, Spanish American War....