This review concerns none of the aforementioned movies - this is a review of the 1943 Nazi propaganda movie entitled Titanic; a feature which suggests that the sinking of the famous ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner could have been avoided if the powers that be had listened to the only German officer on the ship. As an instance of moviemaking, 1943’s Titanic is nothing to get excited about, but as a historical artefact which demonstrates how demented the Nazi party was, Titanic is something of great interest.
If you’re not familiar with the story of the RMS Titanic, here it is in short: it was the largest ship ever made at the time, and was touted as “unsinkable”. During her maiden voyage in 1912 across the North Atlantic Ocean, she struck and iceberg and sunk. With not enough lifeboats to save all the passengers, the disaster led to the deaths of over 1,500 people.
Titanic was green-lit because Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels perceived the real-life disaster as a great example of British incompetency. It was the most expensive German movie up until that time, and endured countless production difficulties. Before shooting had been completed, the film’s director, Herbert Selpin, was overheard making disparaging remarks about the German navy. His remarks were relayed onto the Gestapo, who arrested him and threw him in prison. The following day, Selpin was found hanging in his cell. Production continued nevertheless, and the movie was eventually completed by new director Werner Klingler. The night before Titanic’s debut in Germany, however, the building which housed the premiere print was destroyed in an air raid. Goebbels - who had already endured protests over the treatment of Selpin - subsequently sensed the sequences depicting shipboard panic in the movie too closely echoed the actual panic of the German population (who were subjected to nightly bombings), and decided to ban the film. It was only seen after extensive cutting in occupied Paris. Hitler’s Germany never saw the movie.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Thursday, August 12, 2010
"2012" Movie Review By Marty Meltz Platinum Quality Author
"2012" (my 0-10 rating: 7)
Genre: Action
Director: Roland Emmerich
Screenplay: Roland Emmerich. Harald Kloser
Cast: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt,
Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson, George Segal
Time: 2 hrs., 38 min.
Rating: PG-13 (for intense disaster sequences and some vulgarity)
I d'no. Is there really any room to criticize a movie when it's so much illuminating fun?
Take the words Gargantuan Colossus, upgrade them into outer orbit beyond the capabilities of mere words, and you've got "2012." But it's so big, SO big, that its attempts to introduce the human element fall well into the realm of pitiful. The spectacle is so humongous, so plausible, that in itself it is terrifying. Then come the attempts at human relationships and how they deal with the impending catastrophe, and that effort is pure silliness. At times embarrassingly so.
Director Roland Emmerich, who did "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow," now raises the ante, daring all other filmmakers in the known universe to ever approach this new level of motion picture cataclysmic fury.
Emmerich maintains the everlasting Hollywood tradition of keeping mature, intelligent plot design out of films about mighty natural disasters and just having a grand time with what the most expensive special effects can do. (That tradition's exception was the 1997 "Titanic" but that focused not on the disaster itself but the actual historical human element.)
"2012" dares you to even raise the question about quality of plot. It makes certain you don't even have a second for such trivia amid his Ultimate Spectacular. You've gathered from all the publicity, of course, that it's based on what a few say is a Mayan prediction that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012. With that as a basis, how can you trouble yourself with li'l ol' things like plot?
Still, going very powerfully for the film, is the simple fact that creativity has always deserved front-and-center commendation in the motion picture arts, and this film has a real lot of that, regardless of the fact that the creativity is based on special effects.
And give Emmerich a big break: Within each spectacular sequence he lays in the monumental details for a crafted sense of audience impact. In a word, the colossal events are shaped for megapower. Forget plot, dialogue and acting. Those are not what this movie is about. Indeed, make it a point to forget them.
However, amid the total wipe-out, we do get to worry about a Russian prostitute, a divorced sci-fi novelist now limo driver Jackson Curtis (Cusack) and a puppy dog. More significantly, we're looking at a warning by an astrophysicist in India presented to U.S. science adviser Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) that sunspot activity is perilously heating the earth's core to catastrophe levels. The entire planet's surface and its oceans are about to re-order themselves. That being certainly worthy of attention at the highest level, Helmsley gets the info to the president's Chief of Staff (Oliver Platt) who gets it to the prez (Danny Glover).
Meantime, the word being out among the rich and powerful, they plan their escape while the everyday guy is left without a clue, although many are wondering at the recent huge number of earthquakes happening, splitting up streets into cavernous fissures. And the army is hovering over a mysterious sinkhole. Don't worry about it, exclaims California's governor, everything's fine.
Also meantime, Curtis, the limo driver, picks up a broadcast warning from a certain conspiracy freak, Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson). Curtis takes it seriously and hurries to pick up his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and her dim-bulb, boorish boyfriend. Somehow (and, hey guys, here's a doozy of a Somehow) they drive untouched in their limo through the besieged boulevards of Los Angeles, then on to a plane for a sojourn through the disintegrating Las Vegas. He follows his Russian billionaire boss to a base in Tibet. Why there? Why, because colossal steel arks have been prepared in anticipation of the great flood. Built by whom? Why, the Chinese, of course. And how 'bout it -- they're airlifting animals two-by-two into it -- probably the film's most absurd presumption.
Now comes the total destruction or mangling of immense areas of the planet as solar storms boil the Earth's core, causing earth-quaking calamity everywhere. A 40-story high tsunami lifts an aircraft carrier up and plops it onto the White House. Later on, when the oceans have risen three miles high, anything and everything is lifted.
If you're interested, well, it's only a few students of Mayan history, happily, who are calling for Armageddon on 12-21-2012. The highest present-day Mayan authorities and scholars of the years 250 - 900 A.D., when Mesoamerica was in full swing, state with resounding fervor that, all modern sensationalism aside, the Mayans never made any predictions about any apocalypse. Makes good press, though, and probably good marketing. What they said was, actually, that after that date life on earth will no longer be the same. Economically? Socially? Politically?
The only thing remarkable in Mayan predictions, however, was that on that date in 2012, for the first time in 26,000 years our sun will drift into perfect alignment with the center of the Milky Way galaxy with us on the opposite side. So what's that mean? Well, astronomers tell us that we normally get a lot of energy from that Milky Way center and that's going to be interrupted. So what'll that mean? Details at eleven.
Or, rather, at 12-21-2012.
Marty Meltz, http://www.martymoviereviews.com, was the 30-year films critic for the Award-winning Maine Sunday Telegram until budget cuts terminated the column.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marty_Meltz
Genre: Action
Director: Roland Emmerich
Screenplay: Roland Emmerich. Harald Kloser
Cast: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt,
Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson, George Segal
Time: 2 hrs., 38 min.
Rating: PG-13 (for intense disaster sequences and some vulgarity)
I d'no. Is there really any room to criticize a movie when it's so much illuminating fun?
Take the words Gargantuan Colossus, upgrade them into outer orbit beyond the capabilities of mere words, and you've got "2012." But it's so big, SO big, that its attempts to introduce the human element fall well into the realm of pitiful. The spectacle is so humongous, so plausible, that in itself it is terrifying. Then come the attempts at human relationships and how they deal with the impending catastrophe, and that effort is pure silliness. At times embarrassingly so.
Director Roland Emmerich, who did "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow," now raises the ante, daring all other filmmakers in the known universe to ever approach this new level of motion picture cataclysmic fury.
Emmerich maintains the everlasting Hollywood tradition of keeping mature, intelligent plot design out of films about mighty natural disasters and just having a grand time with what the most expensive special effects can do. (That tradition's exception was the 1997 "Titanic" but that focused not on the disaster itself but the actual historical human element.)
"2012" dares you to even raise the question about quality of plot. It makes certain you don't even have a second for such trivia amid his Ultimate Spectacular. You've gathered from all the publicity, of course, that it's based on what a few say is a Mayan prediction that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012. With that as a basis, how can you trouble yourself with li'l ol' things like plot?
Still, going very powerfully for the film, is the simple fact that creativity has always deserved front-and-center commendation in the motion picture arts, and this film has a real lot of that, regardless of the fact that the creativity is based on special effects.
And give Emmerich a big break: Within each spectacular sequence he lays in the monumental details for a crafted sense of audience impact. In a word, the colossal events are shaped for megapower. Forget plot, dialogue and acting. Those are not what this movie is about. Indeed, make it a point to forget them.
However, amid the total wipe-out, we do get to worry about a Russian prostitute, a divorced sci-fi novelist now limo driver Jackson Curtis (Cusack) and a puppy dog. More significantly, we're looking at a warning by an astrophysicist in India presented to U.S. science adviser Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) that sunspot activity is perilously heating the earth's core to catastrophe levels. The entire planet's surface and its oceans are about to re-order themselves. That being certainly worthy of attention at the highest level, Helmsley gets the info to the president's Chief of Staff (Oliver Platt) who gets it to the prez (Danny Glover).
Meantime, the word being out among the rich and powerful, they plan their escape while the everyday guy is left without a clue, although many are wondering at the recent huge number of earthquakes happening, splitting up streets into cavernous fissures. And the army is hovering over a mysterious sinkhole. Don't worry about it, exclaims California's governor, everything's fine.
Also meantime, Curtis, the limo driver, picks up a broadcast warning from a certain conspiracy freak, Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson). Curtis takes it seriously and hurries to pick up his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and her dim-bulb, boorish boyfriend. Somehow (and, hey guys, here's a doozy of a Somehow) they drive untouched in their limo through the besieged boulevards of Los Angeles, then on to a plane for a sojourn through the disintegrating Las Vegas. He follows his Russian billionaire boss to a base in Tibet. Why there? Why, because colossal steel arks have been prepared in anticipation of the great flood. Built by whom? Why, the Chinese, of course. And how 'bout it -- they're airlifting animals two-by-two into it -- probably the film's most absurd presumption.
Now comes the total destruction or mangling of immense areas of the planet as solar storms boil the Earth's core, causing earth-quaking calamity everywhere. A 40-story high tsunami lifts an aircraft carrier up and plops it onto the White House. Later on, when the oceans have risen three miles high, anything and everything is lifted.
If you're interested, well, it's only a few students of Mayan history, happily, who are calling for Armageddon on 12-21-2012. The highest present-day Mayan authorities and scholars of the years 250 - 900 A.D., when Mesoamerica was in full swing, state with resounding fervor that, all modern sensationalism aside, the Mayans never made any predictions about any apocalypse. Makes good press, though, and probably good marketing. What they said was, actually, that after that date life on earth will no longer be the same. Economically? Socially? Politically?
The only thing remarkable in Mayan predictions, however, was that on that date in 2012, for the first time in 26,000 years our sun will drift into perfect alignment with the center of the Milky Way galaxy with us on the opposite side. So what's that mean? Well, astronomers tell us that we normally get a lot of energy from that Milky Way center and that's going to be interrupted. So what'll that mean? Details at eleven.
Or, rather, at 12-21-2012.
Marty Meltz, http://www.martymoviereviews.com, was the 30-year films critic for the Award-winning Maine Sunday Telegram until budget cuts terminated the column.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marty_Meltz
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