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No Better Place to Die


Los

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I hear they had cannons in Gettysburg... but then, I hear that Normandy invasion wasn't a small-arms battle either.

Anyway, you might not want to hold your breath while waiting for it:

As a result of the current financial crisis our funding for the film fell through. We are doing everything we can to get it up and running again. We will keep you posted.

Hopefully they fired their webmaster first. What's the point of that mile wide gap on the left hand side? And why have a link to your blog if there's no blog postings???

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Thanks for the heads up about this movie project, I hadn't heard of it until now. Yeah it sucks to hear it may never get finished.

Well hopefully Dale Dye can get some financial help from the likes of Hanks and Spielberg. Remember he was their senior military advisor for Saving Pvt. Ryan and Band of Brothers. They're obviously partial to WWII history/movies and could easily get this project up and running again.

Not quite sure about that whole "bloodiest small arms battle in US history" statement. Sounds more like PR or a marketing tag line than a historical statement.

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It is known as the bloodiest small-arms battle in the history of U.S. warfare. Paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division jumped in the night through a torrent of gunfire into the swamped Normandy countryside. Hundreds were killed before they landed. Many drowned. Those who survived faced a deadly and vital mission. They were outnumbered and outgunned. To the brave men whose blood and guts made possible the D-Day assault of June 6, 1944, there was “No Better Place to Die.”

I swear, the 82nd Airborne propaganda machine is worse than the Marines. As nearly as I can tell, this is nothing more than the retreading of the Normandy jumps.

We've all seen Longest Day. The guy on the steeple, the colonel with the busted leg in the wheelbarrow, the cricket clickers, Flash-Thunder, Gavin getting lost, paratroopers drinking calvados. Plus probably Ike choking up when he talks to that Captain, the whole weather window deal, and (take your pick) the heroic C-47 pilots that got a raw deal from history as during the Normandy jumps Every One Was a Hero or the criminally incompetent C-47 pilots, who were more dangerous to the 82nd than the Germans, and it makes sense too as the C-47 pilots were Air Corps.

Sure, maybe they'll do it up right and it'll be riveting cinema. But judging from the web site, it sure looks like a Dale Dye milking the money cow to me.

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What makes you say that? Is it the choice of subject or something else? I saw nothing on the site to merit that level of scorn, so what did I miss?

Tactically. What's interesting about a human wave across a choke point? You can eulogise the courage of the man - and rightly - but what is there that hasn't been said a million times?

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OK, call me a romanticist, but I think its a story worth telling - what's a life worth, after all? It may be a boring tactical problem, but it could still inspire and teach. I doubt Dye would get involved in "crap movies" myself.

There are too many untold stories from the war, increasingly fewer people to tell theirs any more - and its not like the present generation would not benefit from an opportunity to learn some history and to appreciate sacrifices made for them in the past.

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There are too many untold stories from the war, increasingly fewer people to tell theirs any more - and its not like the present generation would not benefit from an opportunity to learn some history and to appreciate sacrifices made for them in the past.

No part of Normandy landings is an untold story, at least from the American perspective. Everything about them has been told again, again, again and again, ad nauseum in millions of books, documentaries, movies, games and other works. Letters from Iwo Jima was an untold story (in Hollywood). NBPTD is not. Not that it couldn't be a great story or worthy of a movie, but it is far from unseen and unheard of.

Now Inglorious Basterds should be interesting. You can't go wrong with a combination of Tarantino and spaghetti warploitation! :D

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No part of Normandy landings is an untold story, at least from the American perspective. Everything about them has been told again, again, again and again, ad nauseum in millions of books, documentaries, movies, games and other works. Letters from Iwo Jima was an untold story (in Hollywood). NBPTD is not. Not that it couldn't be a great story or worthy of a movie, but it is far from unseen and unheard of.

Now Inglorious Basterds should be interesting. You can't go wrong with a combination of Tarantino and spaghetti warploitation! :D

I was speaking of Hollywood doing this particular historical event...AFAIK, it has not been done in a movie treatment before. Of course I've read of it in several different books. That's not what I meant.

And I do wish Hollywood (and other nation's movie centers) would do more in this vein - telling the stories of soldiers from this era - with some semblance of historical accuracy. SPR was fine cinematography, but wasn't history; Enemy at the Gates was a fine love story - but wasn't history. Etc, etc.

Now I only hope that the global economic situation clears up, so I can start leaning on my Ukrainian movie producer friend again, to do the WW2 movie he has been thinking about for several years now. He's got an interesting story to tell, based upon a real event from the war, where the Germans had a small Red Army unit cut off behind their lines and basically let it be for a while - and when they tried to break out, it was their own side that cut them down as they tried to enter the main Red Army lines. Sad but all too typical and true. Too dismally bleak for a movie, you say? Well, it's a Ukrainian thing - what else do you expect from a people whose anthem, roughly translated, goes "Ukraine is not yet dead"...?

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And I do wish Hollywood (and other nation's movie centers) would do more in this vein - telling the stories of soldiers from this era - with some semblance of historical accuracy.

So do we all. But I fear that will happen the day after it is announced that Hell has frozen over. Hollywood has its own ideas about what makes a good movie, i.e., one that lots of people will pay to go to see. And it doesn't really matter how many times they are shown to be wrong, they stick to the formula with grim determination. If somebody comes along with a non-formula movie that does well at the box office they might jiggle the formula a little while to suggest that they are doing something new—with great fanfare of course—but they never seem to change anything really basic (at least not for the better). Pretty soon it is back to the old sixes and sevens.

Michael

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Well, they did pretty well with Band of Brothers - albeit not strictly speaking a "movie" but still coming from the same community and creators. We can only hope that that project inspires similar works. I recently saw the movie about the liberation of the POW's in the Philippines and that was not bad at all...A- in my book. And there is a Pacific Theater BOB equivalent in production too...So bring 'em on! I'm ready!

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We can only hope that that project inspires similar works.

Oh, it will. They'll try to figure out the formula and repeat it endlessly. What they won't do is dive into the soul of each story and discover what makes it truly unique and worth seeing, and then go from there with a fresh effort and take.

Okay, that's taking the most pessimistic view. But it's the one that is justified 99 times out of 100. Just remember Enemy at the Gates and Pearl Harbor. Or don't; I wouldn't blame you.

:D

Michael

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No part of Normandy landings is an untold story, at least from the American perspective.

With the unfortunate exception of every single part of them.

gunnergoz is exactly right and all your pontificating won't change any of that, nor the complaining about Hollywood's past indiscretions, digressions and any other "essions"...

How many films have there been which featured or even depicted one of the Duplex Drive tanks, or showed what life was like for an M4 (or any other kind of tank) crew?

Zero.

Don't recall any first hand accounts by American tankers off-hand that would make decent fodder - not on the order of Tout's book or Wilson's FLAMETHROWER but surely there is fodder for same. After the popularity of THE BEAST about the Soviet tank crew in Afghanistan, one has to believe a movie from the POV of an American tank would be of interest. These guys were suicides every morning, rolling into action in tinder boxes. And they knew it. Fascinating stuff for a movie, just like World War I flying aces. Not a single film.

And you're telling us it's been done to death?

Point-du-Hoc. Other than the mix of kitchen-sink retelling in The Longest Day with a bit of Fabian star power and "whaddus budda-budda mean" camp thrown in, never been a movie about Army Rangers on D-Day.

Never been a decent film that really showed Omaha as it really was - hours of milling in the surf; would make a lousy film, of course, but the SPR boys - the first wave - launched across the shingle in all of 12 minutes. Fuller's boys did it in about the same, under sunny Israeli skies.

You can go beyond the landings to all of Normandy, of course. Never seen a film actually depict the bocage. Big Red One took part on a Middle Eastern steppe.

Never seen a Culin Cutter in a film or any reason for anyone to use one. Bloody Gulch, the Causeway, XYZ, a thousand little battles all worthy of telling, but there are major elements of the story that have never even been hinted at on film - the camouflage uniforms of the 2nd Armored, the casualty rates of the infantry, the short bombing during 'Cobra' that killed Lesley McNair. Maybe you can tell us which movie all of that has been done to death in because I've never seen it.

These details have nothing to do with making dramatic, engaging movies because that's character and dialogue and story, and tanks and ballistics are beside the point. Something Michael Bay doesn't seem to understand. But you find a Lee Marvin or whatever equivalent you can find today, and please tell me it isn't Ben Affleck, and put him in a movie about DD tanks on June 6, and give him significant things to say about loss and sacrifice, and hell, even make it an allegory for Iraq in some way, I think you'll get people to pay for it.

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With the unfortunate exception of every single part of them.

gunnergoz is exactly right and all your pontificating won't change any of that, nor the complaining about Hollywood's past indiscretions, digressions and any other "essions"...

How many films have there been ...

I think it would help, Watch, if you addressed the point that Sergei actually made, which was ...

No part of Normandy landings is an untold story, at least from the American perspective. Everything about them has been told again, again, again and again, ad nauseum in millions of books, documentaries, movies, games and other works.
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I think it would help, Watch, if you addressed the point that Sergei actually made, which was ...

I appreciate the advice, bro. In return, I think it would help if

a) you let other people speak for themselves if they feel their view has been misrepresented

B) read their entire posts before presuming to speak for them

c) engaged in conversations about the topic at hand instead of acting like a pretentious prig and and picking apart other people's posts instead of just talking about the subject at hand.

But if you really want to broaden the scope, sure; has the average movie goer read dozens of books about Normandy? I'm willing to bet Joe Q. Public never read a single one of those Normandy books, played a single Normandy video game, or caught a single episode of The World at War before going to see "that Tom Hanks war movie" when SPR came out.

So what was your point again?

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