rlc27
Posts: 306
Joined: 7/21/2001 From: Connecticut, USA Status: offline
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A proper filming of part of the Battle of the Bulge, focusing on Kampfgruppe Peiper as the bad guys.
Ed Harris as Peiper, looking all cold and professional. Tom Hanks as the earnest faced American colonel holding the Belgian town across the river; Willem Dafoe as a strung out captain who drinks too much and in a fit of desperation ends up calling artillery down on his own position, stopping the German onrush but immolating himself and his men. Adam Sandler as the comic relief, probably a minstrel-type figure who sings a song to the men gathered miserably around the Christmas Turkey (get it?). He and Robin Williams play off each other--Williams is a grisled old sergeant who is expert at boosting the morale of his troops by telling jokes on the radio.
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are both young, friends-cum-rival lieutenants who grew up in the same neighborhood in Boston and attended West Point together (what else?). One of them ends up getting killed tragically, and the other gets shrapnel in his bum and thus also gets Liv Tyler, a nurse in the local aid station, who had formerly been the fiance with the guy who got killed. Hey, wait a minute?! Haven't we seen this before?
Anthony Hopkins as Hitler, ranting and insisting on the Big Solution. "Patton? I'll eat his liver with a nice chianti." The current-day chubby Mark Hamill as Adolf Galland. "You are all responsible for staying with your wingmen."
Hmm, maybe Robert Dinero as Sepp Dietrich. Yeah! He's got the whole calm demeanor-hair trigger temper-brutality thing going on that befits an SS man like Dietrich. "You lookin' at me?"
All the tanks, artillery pieces, airplanes are authentic, or at least convincing mockups--none of this using surplus US howitzers as German artillery pieces. Filmed on site in the Ardennes, as close as possible to where the actual battles took place. An 8 week boot camp for all the actors who are going to be in it.
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"They couldn't hit an elephant from this dist--" --John Sedgwick, failing to reduce suppression during the Battle of the Wilderness, U.S. Civil War.
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