Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Saving Private Ryan

11:55 / 09.11.07

This movie is great! I think it ranks with one of Spielberg's best.

The Sun washing out the colors of the flag. God judging the ideals of freedom and the colors are mute and diluted.....

the Baptism of blood when the Tom Hanks character puts on his helmet with the blood of the beach washing his face bloody as he is witnessing the massacre and sacrifices of the Army.....

The speech where the general says men are sacrificed on the altar of freedom misparaphasing Lincoln echo back to the idea where the sun washes out the colors of the US flag.

The abandoned church scene where the soldiers find their only solitude from the war only all to be sacrificed later.

Are just phenomenal tidbits from a Great Great movie.

Pvt. Jackson the sniper.

12:06 / 09.11.07

Troll?

12:12 / 09.11.07

No, you're thinking of Lord of the Rings, the SECOND most realistic war film ever made.

Where the heroes' colors were all washed.

And the villains scream "I smell manflesh!"

Good times.

12:13 / 09.11.07

Troll???
More like lawful good paladin.

12:16 / 09.11.07

yichihyon, why are you starting a thread on this film now? At the same time as starting several threads where basically you enthuse about stuff you like, saying how great it is?

12:21 / 09.11.07

Yes, Y, I think it would be more constructive for yourself, your threads, for us all and specially for the depth of your own appreciation and joy of those films if you'd put more work and space for discussion into the threads you already created and not treat them so much as advertisements for films you like.

12:22 / 09.11.07

i wonder if anyone have any analytical thoughts on this film since it's been out on dvd. Seeing it in the theater it sort of washes over you and you can't linger on it as well as when you see it and try to analyze it on dvd. To analyze a movie you have to see it over and over. muliple viewings help you truly enjoy it or we'll have some sort of review type writing on the movie rather than an analysis.

12:24 / 09.11.07

I thought it was war porn, poorly written, cheesily acted and badly directed and over reliant on SFX with a lame hackneyed story.

Tom Hanks really, really annoyed me, even more than the ultra-annoying Matt Damon.

12:27 / 09.11.07

What do you rate as one of the best films ever and why?

12:32 / 09.11.07

there are some problems like how can the Pvt Ryan character reflect back on what transpired to the Tom Hanks Capt Miller character and why Matt Damon looks nothing like the old Pvt Ryan character but i think it still holds up to one of the great films of our era.

12:38 / 09.11.07

When I first saw it in the movies at, I think, the age of 12 I had my jaw on the floor. For the first time I experienced THX, and it was on a brutal scene with kids vomiting with fear and low chances of survival with an unforgiving line of fire. I thought "holy shit, war is hell and I'll never play a war videogame or any other war day-dreaming ever again. It'd be disrespectful."

When the film ended, I thought "whoever makes this chaotic awfulness into a game, it'll sell like a mot*&$#$%er (two or three years later, a thousand D-day games and a million WWII games following them). And I wanted to watch it for a second time. And suddenly all these cheesy-but-not-enough-to-explode-cheesomometers became more visible as the horror was banalized and glorified through "war is hell, men go through hell and become Lancelots" into so many-but-equal different packages of USA war nostalgias.

So yeah, war porn.

And an ad that extended itself all the way into that hbo Band of Brothers show, games, documentaries etc etc etc

Dr Strangelove is still undefeated.

12:55 / 09.11.07

War porn? Men shooting off their guns and killing each other dead is war porn? Kubrick had me laughing in the aisles with insult after insult in Full Metal Jacket though. The drill sargent drilling "privates" had to die as well didn't he? Stuff happens like that in real life so I wouldn't be laughing that much. War is serious and human life is serious so I think "Saving" Private Ryan was a good thing to do.

15:03 / 09.11.07

Dude, the film is about a publicity stunt. Why waste a dozen lives to save one? To make the army look good, that's why.
When I say War Porn I mean it's graphic depictions of violence, gratuitous blood and guts and bullets, really real realistic shootings and so on in order to entertain. It's like the Coliseum, watching lions eat christians. As porn is to sex, Saving Private Ryan is to war.

What do you rate as one of the best films ever and why?

That's a whole other thread. You mean War films? I'll go with Apocalypse Now, thanks.