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aox wrote:Well, I would hardly categorize PoG as a "battlefield film". That's a pretty ridiculous assertion.

Michael Kerpan wrote:knives -- except for the (arbitrary) low score -- I'm not sure that there is anything inherently ridiculous about this opinion comparing PoG and AQotWF.

triodelover wrote:

aox wrote:Well, I would hardly categorize PoG as a "battlefield film". That's a pretty ridiculous assertion.

I don't know that I would characterize either as "battlefield" films except in the sense that there are battles in both. With the exception of the ending, I would say that the most important scenes in AQotWF take place away from the battlefield. As far as intensity goes, watching three men arbitrarily stood up in front of a firing squad as expiation for incompetent and corrupt leadership seems pretty intense to me. I know the first time I saw the film as a young teen in the early '60s I kept thinking surely the executions will be stopped. it's Hollywood, isn't it?

Finally, I'm not sure the comparisons are apt. Other than being able to broadly classify both as anti-war films, they are very different films. A better comparison for AQotWF might be Poirier's Verdun, souvenirs d'histoire or Bernard's Les croix de bois.

triodelover wrote:As far as intensity goes, watching three men arbitrarily stood up in front of a firing squad as expiation for incompetent and corrupt leadership seems pretty intense to me.

Finally, I'm not sure the comparisons are apt. Other than being able to broadly classify both as anti-war films, they are very different films.

A better comparison for AQotWF might be Poirier's Verdun, souvenirs d'histoire or Bernard's Les croix de bois.

This was what I was getting at. Not only is the person dismissing the film out of hand with no real backing of their opinion, but the one real statement in the comment doesn't make sense except in the broadest terms. I wouldn't even classify Paths of Glory as a anti-war film so that means they have only setting in common which means nothing important. The comment sounds pre-judgmental to what the person expects out of a war film versus what the person got.

aox wrote:Wooden Crosses next to AQotWF is a very apt comparison. Too good almost.

swo17 wrote: calling Wooden Crosses "France's answer to AQotWF."

aox wrote:I honestly can't tell with your post if you are arguing or agreeing with me that it is silly to categorize PoG as a 'battlefield film'.

swo17 wrote:

aox wrote:Wooden Crosses next to AQotWF is a very apt comparison. Too good almost.

The Eclipse liner notes (and Criterion's website) also make this comparison, calling Wooden Crosses "France's answer to AQotWF." Though personally, as far as anti-war French films punctuated with visual poetry go, I give the edge to J'accuse (despite it having been made 13 years earlier).

aox wrote:It doesn't surprise me, though, unless Bernard made the claim, I am somewhat surprised CC did. As I said, it's an easy comparison, almost lazy. I admittedly made it myself at the time. But I am always apprehensive about forming that sentence in any context. Isn't "Tarkovsky's Solaris supposed to be Russia's answer to 2001: ASO"? I think I repeated that nonsense line a lot when I was a 16 year old neophyte. I mean, unless a director comes straight out and admits that he is either remaking a film from the past few years or completely aping one, I don't know if it is a healthy academic discussion.

matrixschmatrix wrote: (though obviously reductive if you pretend that's all that's going on.)

Michael Kerpan wrote:I guess I just was not giving "battlefield film" as specific a meaning. I agree the comparison is definitely _insipid_ in any event. ;~}

I had the opportunity (such as it was) to watch Disk 1: THE MECHANIZED EYE at a friend's house. He was all worked up about this "fantastic" collection of Avant Garde Films that he had acquired, and wanted to share them with his friends. Great.

The first few clips were interesting enough; I often enjoy original material and some of them were indeed original. I liked "Scene from Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower" (1900) and tried to imagine the impact that it had on its original audience. It must have been a tremendous experience for them.

"Captain Nissen Going through Whirlpool Rapids, Niagara Falls" (1901) was great. This time my thoughts were with Captain Nissen inside his strange craft. I wondered what he was feeling.

Things went pretty well until we came to "Pie in the Sky" (1934-35)-Nykino: Elia Kazan, Ralph Steiner & Irving Lerner.

Then came the ambush.

"Pie in the Sky" is a trash piece of mockery of Christianity in general and Jesus Christ specifically. In filming this self indulgent piece of garbage Elia Kazan revealed nothing of his great talent that he would bring to the screen in the years to come, but he and his cronies revealed much of their arrogance, distain for the rights of their fellow man and just plain ignorance of the subject matter that they attacked.

I'm not surprised that the compilers of this collection of films would include such a useless piece of dog dropping in an otherwise laudable collection. The same ambush tactic has been used to spread Hollywood's propaganda program of hatred of God for a number of years now. Rather I'm simply disgusted with a time in our history where apparently most people don't even see a problem with it.

They didn't see a problem with it during Hitler's rise to power in Germany either. The only difference is that then it was the Jews under attack, today it's the Christians. The hate, and the propaganda program used to express it, are the same. The film makers are good at it. And this in a country that was started by people who came seeking an end of religious persecution.

Movies and games come labeled with warnings about violence, mature subject matter, etc. but there is no warning at all when they contain anti-Christian, anti-God material. It's no wonder so many of my friends and acquaintances don't even go to the theater any more. They're fed up with being "ambushed" by Hollywood's anti-Christian attacks in the middle of a film that they paid a fistful of their hard earned dollars to see.

There's nothing Avant Garde about religious bigotry; it's been around for a long time.

I'll pass on this one.

cdnchris wrote:I bet you Hitchcock is so pissed he wasn't able to travel in to the future so he could know about Disturbia. I can only imagine how embarrassed he would be if he knew he ripped that movie off. You'd think he'd notice that.

oldsheperd wrote:I like the tweet response by one reader that "This can't be real. It can't be."
I can just imagine Ricky Jay reading that aloud with the music form Magnolia over the background.

oldsheperd wrote:Someone told me that in one of their film classes a student wrote her final paper on why Jaws is really an allegory about man's fear of the vagina. Shark=Vagina.

Murdoch wrote:This reminds me of a intro film class I took where someone argued that Transformers was more "purely cinematic" than Rear Window because it had a lot of explosions, no joke

oldsheperd wrote:Someone told me that in one of their film classes a student wrote her final paper on why Jaws is really an allegory about man's fear of the vagina. Shark=Vagina.