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The Longest Movie
Nov. 19th, 2017 08:33 amKirsten and I watched Downfall last night, another one of those movies she's never seen. Such an amazing film. Watching Hitler just disintegrate like that, and even at the very end, with the Russians within a city block, his followers still thought there would be a miraculous counter-offensive.
We watched this after trying to watch The Longest Day, one of my all-time favorite war movies. This 1962 epic covers the June 6th, 1944 invasion of Normandy from multiple points of views on all sides of the war. The film had four directors, American, English, French, and German, and in the original cut, all the actors spoke their native languages. This decision made the film far more authentic. When a German officer is screaming "You know those 2,000 ships the Allies don't have? They're shelling me right now!" it just comes off better in German. Same for hearing a Resistance fighter reacting to a coded message that the invasion is nigh in French. The native directors and actors also gave the characters more cultural realism. It was this version that I've come to love.
Sadly, there is a second version, filmed simultaneously with the good one, in which all the actors speak English. Bleah. This is the version Netflix has, and it sucks when you're used to the real version. I want my Germans barking order in good guttural German!
But thinking about The Longest Day makes me long for a remake. I'm normally against remakes of classic films. Nine times out of ten nothing is added and the addition of modern touches only detracts. The remake of War of the Worlds replaced real tension with big explosions, for example. You also risk comparisons of modern actors with legends in a remake. But every so often, a remake is called for.
I think The Longest Day is one of those films. As epic as it is, it suffers from several issues not with the film itself, but the Hollywood culture and technology of the time. The biggest example of the former is the casting of John Wayne as Lt. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 505th PIR, 82nd Airborne Division. Wayne, at the time the movie was being made, was 28 years older than Vandervoot was on D-Day. He was also clearly out of shape. Much of the casting in the film is a legacy of the "house stars" system where you put the actors you had under contract into the movie even if they didn't fit.
Recasting the film with more age-appropriate actors, and putting them through a boot camp so they at least look like they know what to do with a rifle is a start. The next issue is the science of making a movie. Watch The Longest Day today and you can easily spot the scenes that are supposed to be outside but had obviously been shot on a soundstage. Backdrops only a few feet behind the soldiers, obviously fake trees in the foreground. Even the scene where a Chaplain keeps diving in a pond looking for his communion gear was shot in a studio.
Today, with modern CGI and better ability to shoot outdoors, these scenes can look so much better. Yeah, the Chaplain is still diving in a studio tank with a rescue swimmer just off camera, but the tank is in front of a green screen that makes it look like a French millpond at night. CGI would also greatly improve the battle scenes. The original relied on 2,000 extras, mostly from the Irish Army, and clever camera angles. They also used archival film from WWII to fill in the gaps. This worked, but it doesn't really give the scale of the operations.
So we go back, hire the Irish Army again, but fill the ranks on the beaches with CGI troops and vehicles. Fill the sky with CGI C-47s and Spitfires. Don't make CGI the star, but use it to fill in the story. But use real explosions whenever possible, they still look better.
The script itself needs almost no changing. Following the stories of the people who fought on this, the longest day of the war, is what the movie is actually about. Because that's what all good movies are about; the people involved.
So get to it, Hollywood! This is one of the biggest events in recent history, and is dying to be given a $200 million facelift! Leave the opening card titles, leave in the intermission, I will pay to see this in IMAX, and I hate IMAX!
We watched this after trying to watch The Longest Day, one of my all-time favorite war movies. This 1962 epic covers the June 6th, 1944 invasion of Normandy from multiple points of views on all sides of the war. The film had four directors, American, English, French, and German, and in the original cut, all the actors spoke their native languages. This decision made the film far more authentic. When a German officer is screaming "You know those 2,000 ships the Allies don't have? They're shelling me right now!" it just comes off better in German. Same for hearing a Resistance fighter reacting to a coded message that the invasion is nigh in French. The native directors and actors also gave the characters more cultural realism. It was this version that I've come to love.
Sadly, there is a second version, filmed simultaneously with the good one, in which all the actors speak English. Bleah. This is the version Netflix has, and it sucks when you're used to the real version. I want my Germans barking order in good guttural German!
But thinking about The Longest Day makes me long for a remake. I'm normally against remakes of classic films. Nine times out of ten nothing is added and the addition of modern touches only detracts. The remake of War of the Worlds replaced real tension with big explosions, for example. You also risk comparisons of modern actors with legends in a remake. But every so often, a remake is called for.
I think The Longest Day is one of those films. As epic as it is, it suffers from several issues not with the film itself, but the Hollywood culture and technology of the time. The biggest example of the former is the casting of John Wayne as Lt. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 505th PIR, 82nd Airborne Division. Wayne, at the time the movie was being made, was 28 years older than Vandervoot was on D-Day. He was also clearly out of shape. Much of the casting in the film is a legacy of the "house stars" system where you put the actors you had under contract into the movie even if they didn't fit.
Recasting the film with more age-appropriate actors, and putting them through a boot camp so they at least look like they know what to do with a rifle is a start. The next issue is the science of making a movie. Watch The Longest Day today and you can easily spot the scenes that are supposed to be outside but had obviously been shot on a soundstage. Backdrops only a few feet behind the soldiers, obviously fake trees in the foreground. Even the scene where a Chaplain keeps diving in a pond looking for his communion gear was shot in a studio.
Today, with modern CGI and better ability to shoot outdoors, these scenes can look so much better. Yeah, the Chaplain is still diving in a studio tank with a rescue swimmer just off camera, but the tank is in front of a green screen that makes it look like a French millpond at night. CGI would also greatly improve the battle scenes. The original relied on 2,000 extras, mostly from the Irish Army, and clever camera angles. They also used archival film from WWII to fill in the gaps. This worked, but it doesn't really give the scale of the operations.
So we go back, hire the Irish Army again, but fill the ranks on the beaches with CGI troops and vehicles. Fill the sky with CGI C-47s and Spitfires. Don't make CGI the star, but use it to fill in the story. But use real explosions whenever possible, they still look better.
The script itself needs almost no changing. Following the stories of the people who fought on this, the longest day of the war, is what the movie is actually about. Because that's what all good movies are about; the people involved.
So get to it, Hollywood! This is one of the biggest events in recent history, and is dying to be given a $200 million facelift! Leave the opening card titles, leave in the intermission, I will pay to see this in IMAX, and I hate IMAX!
