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| Iwo Jima flag (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Flags of Our Fathers
By Jim Castagnera
Special to The History Place
11/20/06
Clint Eastwood's new film Flags of Our Fathers depicts reporter-photographer Joe Rosenthal wading awkwardly ashore on Iwo Jima. A wave washes over his camera. All the same, his trusty Speed Graphic captures the iconic photograph that a few days later will grace some 200 front pages and win Rosenthal the Pulitzer Prize. Rosenthal worked for newspapers in his hometown, San Francisco, from 1932 until his 1981 retirement. Nothing else in that half-century of photojournalism came close to the single negative around which Eastwood's film is built. As recently as 1996, Rosenthal, who died just last August, was named an honorary Marine by the Corps's commandant in recognition of the famous photo.
By Jim Castagnera
Special to The History Place
3/19/10
And, as if that was not enough luck of the Irish, we have the added treat of Matt Damon inThe Green Zone, which opened last Friday. This new release is The Hurt Locker on steroids and amphetamines. Damon plays an Army warrant officer leading a team in search of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in the immediate aftermath of the spring 2003 invasion. Apparently filmed mostly with hand-held cameras and edited with a hacksaw, The Green Zone is nearly two hours of frenetic action.
More: http://www.historyplace.com/specials/reviews/hurt-locker-and-green-zone.htm
By Claire and Jim Castagnera
Special to The History Place
9/7/09
Some years ago the tenth anniversary issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History asked a group of eminent historians to opine upon the most important what-ifs of warfare. Out of that exercise came a collection entitled The Collected What If? (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001). Should a DVD version of the book be made today, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (his misspellings, not ours) would be the lead entry.
Without revealing the ending, suffice to say that Tarantino asks the cinematic question, “What if a group of partisans could get Hitler and his top three or four lieutenants all into a Paris movie theater at the same time and then blow it up?” The path to that question’s answer is a two-hour romp, strewn with corpses and sprinkled with laughs.
More: http://www.historyplace.com/specials/reviews/inglourious.htm
By Jim Castagnera
Special to The History Place
9/29/08
Spike Lee’s new film Miracle at St. Anna opened on Friday, September 26th, to a blizzard of mostly bad reviews and predictions of a worse reception at the box office. In this sixth year of the Iraq War, so-called “war pictures” are generally ill received. Director Lee reportedly shrugged this off, quoted as musing, “With an African American running for president, anything is possible. There’s a whole new dynamic in the air.”
Standing out from the mostly negative crowd, the Boston Herald labels Miracle nothing less than “a masterpiece.” I happen to agree. Having seen all two hours and 40 minutes of the film, two days after it opened, I left the theater in awe of Lee and author/journalist James McBride, who converted his 2003 novel into the screenplay.
More: http://www.historyplace.com/specials/reviews/Miracle-St-Anna.htm
Rescue Dawn
By Jim Castagnera
Special to The History Place
7/30/07
You know that Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) is more resourceful than your average Navy pilot from the get-go of Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn. He has a quartermaster onboard the aircraft carrier Ranger make him a special sleeping bag of clear-plastic sheeting with a mesh breathing space. He also has him sew a little pouch in his boot, where he can hide his passport. Resourceful, yes, but that's of little help when Dengler is shot down on his first bombing run over Laos. The plastic sleeping bag helps him make it through the first night, but he's captured the next day.
Based on the true story of the only U.S. pilot ever to escape from one of North Vietnam's jungle prison camps, Rescue Dawnis Herzog's second attempt at telling Dengler's remarkable saga. In 1997, Herzog did a documentary about the pilot, whose childhood like Herzog's spanned the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In both films Dengler recounts how the sight of an American fighter pilot strafing his mountain hamlet convinced him he had to be a flier. Fellow prisoner Duane (Steve Zahn) marvels, "He tries to kill you and you want his job."
More: http://www.historyplace.com/specials/reviews/rescue-dawn.htm
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