The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[zedz]

Thanks for the recommendations, I'll have to check them out.

Is anyone planning to list any experimental films? All I can think of right now are:

79 primaveras (Santiago Álvarez)
Crossroads (Bruce Conner)
23rd Psalm Branch (Stan Brakhage)

I haven't actually been able to think of too many (79 primaveras is on my long shortlist, however), since 'war' is such a content-driven genre that most abstracted treatments of it tend to fall out of the genre. That said, there are a LOT of experimental films that address or react to war as a topic, even if that inspiration is well buried.

L'Idee is a contender, as is Borowczyk's Jeux des Anges and, more abstractly, Renaissance. It's one of his least experimental films, but there's also Len Lye's Kill or Be Killed.

Not exactly experimental, but every film Peter Watkins made before Edvard Munch is a war film in some way, shape or form.

[swo17]

Oooh, I'll have to make room for Renaissance, thanks for the reminder. I was already planning on featuring some Watkins.

My list is shaping up, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be most heavy on films from the 1940s. And ones with titles that end with punctuation marks. It looks like, by accident, I will only have one film per director.

[knives]

The War Game is the Watkins for me though Colluden is a 51st sort of choice. As to the '40s thing I'm incredibly embarrassed at how much Archers is likely to wind up on my list. I think only The Battle of River Plate And Canterbury won't be making it. And of course I have to include something by Humphrey Jennings, though I don't know what. Mark Robson is also probably going to make a strong show for me.

[swo17]

The Silent Village!

[knives]

That's actually where I've been leaning to. Good to see it won't be a useless plunge.

[zedz]

I'm going with Fires Were Started (almost certainly top ten for me) and the inevitable / inexplicable S.S. Ionian - and probably The Silent Village too, but I don't know what will need to be amputated to accommodate the latter.

[knives]

Destination Tokyo
This is one of if not the best of the American wartime propaganda films I've seen like a military There Was a Father. The film balances the comedy and seriousness that so many films of the period had trouble melding in such a naturalistic way that the often cynically teasing nature that shines through, especially when it comes to that Daves' pet theme of sexuality, just feels like reality rather than any aimed statement. Sometimes the film does shift straight into propaganda like when they shoot down a Japanese plane, but the few additional beats given and the continued effect of it on the film for scenes after prevent the rahs from being the only effect. It's also an incredibly beautiful film using the sea and fog to amazing effect. It's intensely hard to believe that this was only Daves' first film as director the tone is so deeply effective visually. It all recalls DP Bert Glennon's work on Our Town.

The Year of Living Dangerously
It's hard not to compare this to The Killing Fields which only goes how weird this version of the foreign journalist befriends a professional native of an Asiatic land as a revolution by way of a bloody coup with communists ends in genocide. It starts with the weird choice of the friend, a squeaky voiced midget who regularly acts like the DeNiro to Gibson's Pesci (has Mel Gibson played anyone who wasn't entirely mad) and somehow doesn't end with him being played by Linda Hunt with each newly introduced character and situation quickly revealing some exterior and grotesque horror. Weaver comes the closest to a typical character and she still runs like a horse with blinders on dumb to where she is in her manners and behavior contradicting often times her words. Even with a director of Weir's capabilities these should render the whole an obnoxious and cluttered collection of idiosyncrasies. They manage to work for the most part with just as much jeering at the Australian as the Indonesians helping on that level and a barely ignored melancholy leaking out of the characters. The oddities get turned from geek show to a barrel of lies which is where all of the success lies.

Southern Comfort
Hill's comic book cinematography style doesn't particularly work well with the green on green colour scheme presented here. This single shade ugliness really makes it hard to like this film with the hideously awful protagonists nearly sealing the deal against the film. Their interactions, or rather lack thereof, make it seem as if Hill learned no lessons from Warriors nor Alien. This team is callous and whiny in equal measure. Keith Carradine as obvious hero number two is the only one that seems worth spending a hundred minutes with and even he's dully idiotic for much of the movie presumably only improved by the actor's charisma and the fact that he is less awful than everyone else. The threat too never seems particularly real given their lack of care for the loss of life and the general inactivity of the villains against the squad. With this cast, crew, and premise I expect much better than this Cannon Group level B movie.

Empire of the Sun
This has some of the strangest and most wonderful imagery Spielberg's dreamed up (though given Ballard I wouldn't be surprised if the best of this like the procession of clowns came from the book). Occasionally they get a little too whimsical though the film always situates such moments in wastelands which helps to reel the Spielbergian element in. The film does manage to succeed as more than a collection of images too as stellar as those images are. Bale's point of view really prevents a serious look at the situation, but that is probably to the film's benefit as Spielberg isn't exactly a great political thinker. Instead the narrative seems to reach back to the child adventure films of Alexander MacKendrick by suggesting a general social fear that the situation breeds. The specific are built to not be relevant in short. This leaves the sense that the war is a total abstraction even in a first hand experience. All things needing to be balanced out in the universe though John Williams score almost single handedly ruins the film and makes no sense whatsoever with what the film is attempting to communicate.

Redacted
This is easily DePalma's most unique and daring film in decades. A pseudo-remake of Casualties of War equally bolstered and undermined by its rage against contemporary times. It's the only film from this war I've seen that feels like it is actively involved with the now rather then trying to paint broad platitudes about all wars. The thing that prevents it especially from feeling like a bad Oliver Stone film is the engagement with the language of cinema as the war has changed it. Narratively the film is very straightforward being a remake set to now like I said, but as an aesthetic it is an anthology film which seems to be the only way for DePalma to deal with the closeness and distance of the war. The generic youtube found footage stuff that takes up most of the film by itself lacks all meaning and would just come across dull and polemic. Making it a part of the tapestry of the commentary though allows the basic meaning come across without leaving it as an excuse for artless shakey cam (I'm looking at you Greengrass and Bigelow). The second aesthetic seems to be the biggest reaction to this first one, being a fairly generic French documentary on crimes committed by soldiers. This is where DePalma gets the most polemic and narratively least artful blowing through a series of information as quickly as he can. Fortunately he places it in the context of the aesthetic closest to his traditional one with a soundtrack and camera movements that allows this information to gain a visceral edge. There's even a blatant reference to The Wild Bunch in the most thematically direct fashion shouting imperialism. The next two styles though are perhaps the most unique in terms of fictions made on the war even if they're far too common in reality since they are eternally from the point of view of the mundane Iraqi. The first seems tied with the French documentary, but really is a replication of the news. It's Al-Jazeera in short and allows the film to distance itself from these Europeans for the only instances of the film. Each frame is intended to have a Lady in the Lake watcher and yet this news is the only voice of your average working class Iraqi even though it never takes that reference point entirely. The Americans viewing can't help but be unable to become intimate to their reality no matter how hard the American tries. The last makes most clear the modern youtube nature of the film by literally presenting itself as a series of videos taken from the Internet. Occasionally it presents an American voice as if silly Internet videos are the only honest way to express emotion at home. The majority though is presented as the voice of the native fighting Iraqis (what would be the best term for this?) which is further removed from the American point of view to the extent they have no bodies. They remain only a camera capturing the death of soldiers. There's a few other aesthetics stolen from reality but they essentially are a piece with these four and without making this far longer than I'm willing to do at the moment.

Videograms of a Revolution
This is the best Alexander Kluge film I've seen in a long while and I'm not entirely joking. Faroki and Ujica have really captured how to turn this videogram (for lack of a better word) narrative form into something beside satire thanks to allowing reality to infiltrate the film. Now, I'm not entirely certain if this was the intent, but thanks to Klugian training I can't help but disconnect the narrative that I am being ordered to believe and the images shown. The camera, despite being wielded by many different people obviously, becomes this weird omniscient character who witnesses yet does not act which could be seen as either a damning act or a positive one. I'm not sure and the film doesn't give any indications acting as a bizarrely objective figure. It's a truly uncomfortable style that left me begging for a lie especially as the citation get more and more peculiar and become a story into and of themselves. Just for catharsis I wound up laughing when a camera smuggling story enters the fray. Like I said though I can't really tell how much of this is an imposition I am applying to this footage or if it reflects the reality of the work. Either way though it is a tremendously affecting and effective film that even with Facets disc is unbelievable.

[bamwc2]

Sorry that I've been away for so long. I've been wrapped up with teaching and a ton of side projects in my free time. Here's my final viewing log for the project:

300: Rise of an Empire (Noam Murro, 2014): Despite the first film being a fascistic mess, there was still something that I liked about the bellicose junk. This was just junk. Eva Green does a decent enough job as the treacherous Artemisia, but Sullivan Stapleton's Themistocles is a poor replacement for Gerard Butler's more interesting Leonidas. The film is also a tonal mess, featuring speeches in praise of freedom, while extolling virtues of dictatorship, and spending its run time thumping you with its 'War-Fuck Yeah!' message, and then ending with a remix of Back Sabbath's decidedly anti-war "War Pigs" (an odd choice for a film set in ancient Greece). This was just awful.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2014): Though it's more superhero flick than war film, there are easily enough espionage/war elements in this genre-bending escapist fantasy to warrant inclusion in the list. As those following the Marvel cinematic universe know, Captain America (Chris Evans), a super soldier flash frozen in battle during WWII, is awakened in modern day New York at the end of the first film by SHIELD (a global espionage agency) to take part in their Avengers initiative. In this installment Cap finds himself trapped in the middle of an all out battle between SHIELD and sleeper agents from the world domination desiring Hydra, itself a relic of WWII that survived in the shadows until now. I'm not the biggest fan of superhero films, but I have to admit that I've enjoyed both entries in the series. Here a strong lead by Evans gets a boost from solid supporting performances from Robert Redford and Scarlett Johansson. The film's weakest parts come with Anthony Mackie's Falcon scenes, though their difficulties lie more in the hokey interpretation of the character than the actor's portrayal.

The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1990): And now on to the sublime with my first exposure to one of Ken Burns's long form documentaries. I've seen clips of the first episode in high school and have heard nothing but praise from its viewers, but I wasn't prepared for just how amazing this omnibus examination of the war was. Combining expert commentary (Shelby Foote!) with period pictures and letters from the war's participants, there is so much information here that any Civil War historian is bound to learn something. There's no way that this is going anywhere outside of my top ten.

Fertile Memory (Michel Khleifi, 1980): Khleifi's docudrama (though it seems to fall mostly on 'docu' side) tells the story of two Muslim women living in occupied areas of Palestine as they struggle with the daily bullshit that they have to put up with from both the Israeli occupation and the patriarchal demands of Palestinian society. Unfortunately, I watched this one months ago and don't remember enough to say anything clear on it. What I do remember, I remember liking though.

From Up On Poppy Hill (Goro Miyazaki, 2011): Goro Miyazaki's Tales from the Earthsea was a mess so it's nice to see him do a little bit better here with a tale of a group of precocious teens coming to grips with the fallout of WWII nearly twenty years after Japan's surrender. I know that it's a bit of a stretch calling this a war film, but I watched it for the project and liked it just enough to give it a slight recommendation.

The Good German (Steven Soderbergh, 2006): Soderbergh's black & white neo-noir pulls a bit of a Psycho by first following Toby Maguire's scheming private Tully around occupied West Berlin, before switching over to his journalist attachment payed by George Clooney. The whole film centers around the search for a missing Nazi scientist whose wife (or widow?) Lena (Cate Blanchett) has taken up prostitution as a way to get money to go to America. A lot of things happen, but I had a hard time caring about any of it since everyone involved tries so earnestly to invoke a certain mood that it all comes off as so...forced. Skip it.

The Himmler Project (Romuald Karmakar, 2000): Manfred Zapatka sits behind a desk for three hours while reading a speech of Himmler's. If this sounds like something that you'd enjoy, then you are not me.

John Carter (Andrew Stanton, 2012): While this was savaged by critics on its initial release I've seen a few defenses of it pop up here and there as an underrated genre flick that failed to find an audience because of a botched marketing campaign. Don't buy the hype. This is a confusing turd of a movie set in parallel civil wars in America and Mars. It's even worse than I could have imagined.

Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992): Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Hawkeye in this middling adaptation from auteur director Michael Mann. Costarring Madeleine Stowe as Cora Munro the film features some of the most stunningly beautiful nature photography from the early 90s, but also strangely wooden performances from otherwise great actors. It's nice to watch, but not so much that I'd ever feel compelled to revisit it.

Marriage of the Blessed (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1989): Makhmalbaf's profoundly unsettling tale follows Haji (Mahmud Bigham), a veteran of the war between Iran and Iraq. Suffering from what we can only assume is a severe and undiagnosed case of PTSD, Haji spends his days in a constant battle for sanity that puts into doubt his own career as a journalist as well as his engagement. However, his bride-to-be defies her family by sticking with him in a move that leads to them drawing the ire of the Iranian state. This is a miraculous little film in it's criticism of both the effects of war and the totalitarian culture that actively seeks to crush those who can no longer adapt to its demands.

Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944): Quite probably the biggest of my remaining holes in Lang's oeuvre is now filled, with the inclusion of this oddball WWII third rail spy thriller. Ray Milland stars as Stephen Neale, a British everyman who stumbles into trouble after winning a pie at his local county fair. Unbeknownst to him, the pie contains a hidden message that was bound for someone else until he entered the mix, and now the Nazi agents operating in the UK will stop at nothing to get it back and take him out in the process. As you've surely noticed, the plot is as silly as it gets, but thanks to the able hands of director Lang, its imperfections can be easily overlooked.

Swing Shift (Jonathan Demme, 1984): Sadly the same cannot be said for Jonathan Demme's frequently lauded look at Rosie the Riveters that worked the assembly lines in WWII. Goldie Hawn stars as Kay Walsh, a married woman who finds herself separated from her husband Jack (Ed Harris) after he enlists in the Army. Kay and her female friends in the same predicament begin working in a airplane manufacturing plant where she encounters Lucky (Kurt Russell), a roustabout too lazy to join the war effort, but enough of Lothario to make her forget her husband. Very little rung true for me in the film. I suppose that some women fall for bad boys, but Lucky was so much of a cad in here that I can't imagine why anyone would care for him.

Threads (Mick Jackson, 1984): Jackson's made-for-TV movie about the lead up to and after effects of a nuclear conflict between the USSR and the West has garnered quite a critical reputation, but for the life of me I can't figure out why. The film follows the Kemp family, a group of working class Pollyannas in Sheffield who barely follow the news, and dismiss the gossip of armed nuclear conflict. Boy are they wrong, when they fail to adequately follow their local preparedness instructions and find themselves scattered around the town as the bombs begin to fall. Most of the film follows both the short and long term effect of the disintegration of government and atomic poisoning. The further it goes, however, the farther away it stretches from pulpy melodrama to stuff-of-legend camp.

SpoilerShow

By the time of the final few scenes where the remaining Kemps are ersatz mutants and feral children rule the city it's finished its descent into campy 1950s sci-fi/horror instead of a thoughtful look at the danger of nuclear war.

Ulysses' Gaze (Theo Angelopoulos, 1995): Harvey Keitel stars as A, a Greek-American director who returns to his native land in hopes of finding out the truth behind the country's original filmmakers, the Manakia brothers, who according to legend traversed the countryside filming daily Greek life until they mysteriously disappeared during a war. Did they really exist? Were they killed by the fighting? Unfortunately, A's quest for the truth is hampered by contemporary strife with battles and bloodshed everywhere around him. Like the handful of other Angelopoulos films that I've seen, this one is slow, meditative, and resists easy answers. This isn't always a good thing, but it mostly works here. I think that perhaps some more judicious editing could have made this effort go from 'good' to 'great', but there's little point in quibbling over what's here.

An Unforgettable Summer (Lucian Pintilie, 1994): British actress Kristin Scott Thomas stars as Romanian Marie-Thérèse Von Debretsy (and speaks the language as well!) in this tale of an early-20th century central European military family. When she turns down a flirtatious proposal from her husband's CO, the family finds themselves uprooted to the countryside as punishment where the urban-born Von Debretsy feels ill at ease. While she loves her husband, what follows does not make for a cheery film, as the ravages of the regional conflict wear away at her. Thomas does a great job in her role, and Calin Ghibu's camera perfectly captures the beauty of the remote Romanian outpost. This is an easy recommendation.

[tavernier]

An Unforgettable Summer (Romuald Karmakar, 1994)

Huh?

[zedz]

Swing Shift (Jonathan Demme, 1984): Sadly the same cannot be said for Jonathan Demme's frequently lauded look at Rosie the Riveters that worked the assembly lines in WWII. Goldie Hawn stars as Kay Walsh, a married woman who finds herself separated from her husband Jack (Ed Harris) after he enlists in the Army. Kay and her female friends in the same predicament begin working in a airplane manufacturing plant where she encounters Lucky (Kurt Russell), a roustabout too lazy to join the war effort, but enough of Lothario to make her forget her husband. Very little rung true for me in the film. I suppose that some women fall for bad boys, but Lucky was so much of a cad in here that I can't imagine why anyone would care for him.

Don't be too harsh on this film, as it was famously mauled by the studio. Demme's original cut is the one that has the elevated reputation, but unfortunately it's also the one that only a handful of people have seen.

[domino harvey]

Glad to see you're still with us, bamwc2-- and you brought viewings!

[bamwc2]

An Unforgettable Summer (Romuald Karmakar, 1994)

Huh?

Oops. That was some bad cutting and pasting there. It should have said "Lucian Pintilie" for the director.

[zedz]

An Unforgettable Summer (Lucian Pintilie, 1994): British actress Kristin Scott Thomas stars as Romanian Marie-Thérèse Von Debretsy (and speaks the language as well!) in this tale of an early-20th century central European military family. When she turns down a flirtatious proposal from her husband's CO, the family finds themselves uprooted to the countryside as punishment where the urban-born Von Debretsy feels ill at ease. While she loves her husband, what follows does not make for a cheery film, as the ravages of the regional conflict wear away at her. Thomas does a great job in her role, and Calin Ghibu's camera perfectly captures the beauty of the remote Romanian outpost. This is an easy recommendation.

This reminds me that Pintilie's marvellous mid-length Tertium non datur is also a war film. It's one of my favourite of his films: stripped back but nonetheless eccentric, with inventively theatrical staging (the soldiers use bits and pieces lying around to turn a trashed barn into a banquet hall, and disassemble the 'set' at the end). In the dying days of WWII, a major brags to his troops about his possession of the rarest stamp in the world (only two are in existence, hence the film's title), which immediately goes missing, with tragicomic consequences. The reflexivity of the film harks back to Pintilie's early masterpiece Reenactment, but this is clearly the relaxed, playful work of an old master.

[swo17]

Both available in this great Pintilie set. It's now showing up as "unavailable" at Carturesti, so people might want to snap it up soon in case they don't have a chance to later.

[knives]

Judgment at Nuremberg
This isn't one of the worst films of all time which is to say it comes close to being Kramer's best film. This has some of the strangest performances ever with no two people acting as if they were in the same movie. The reliably offbeat Richard Widmark is the most satisfyingly off performer basically trying to see if he can suffocate himself with his own voice. When William Shatner is the most stable performer in a film you know it is a rough experience. Though given the hamfisted monologues he speaks it is hard to blame him for being insane. Poor Max Schell though who seems to be taking the film very personally and yet never could recover from what is easily the worst piece of camera work I've seen maybe ever. Kramer is just having an ADD fit with this film pulling as many camera movements as he can to distract the audience presumably from this essentially being a theater piece. The movements also make the film seem very cheap such as the jerky movements that show sad little Burt Lancaster for the first time (it can't be emphasized enough how nothing about the actual trial scenes work). If I had to go through every false, or hamfisted, or weird, or unsuccessful, or offensive, or self congratulatory, or condescending moment in the film than it would be almost as long as this epic of failure. Maybe if it were just one or two of these consistent problems invading the film were present I'd could like it well enough despite my better judgement like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, but no. It has to be a Kramer picture of the utmost seriousness. What's worse is that its entire point of view is perverted to an ahistorical excuse to the judges just so that the film has an air of gray when it doesn't. Worst of all these elements are the closest the film can muster to being interesting with most of the scenes just rising to being boring. I mean why bother introducing the plot with Dietrich which is totally irrelevant to the judgement as hand and the awkward attempts to connect it to the trial is both redundant and a crime of historical ignorance. The one moment of quality in the film, the sole minutes that resemble the film Kramer seems to be thinking he is making, Montgomery Clift's still problematic scene, is completely destroyed by Kramer underlining how important it is with a close up of Spencer Tracy crying.

Battle of Britain
Cute little overlong movie that offers nothing terribly unique beyond colour cinematography that a million other similar films from the era didn't provide. In short cute and a healthy way to wash out the self righteousness of Kramer.

Hamburger Hill
If I hear that I don't give a damn song in another Vietnam movie I will go insane. It's as uncreative as showing your movie is set in the '30s by playing Sing Sing Sing. This is basically just a well humoured variation on Platoon made just incompetently enough to be amusing. But hey, there's Don Cheadle and it is definitely the Zero Hour to Tropic Thunder's Airplane.

Aimee and Jaguar
I get why the film is important and was popular at the time, but nothing about it rises above mediocrity making only its historical context the only enjoyable thing and one doesn't even need to see the film to affirm that. The central romance is played fairly safe in terms of its conflicts making it just about useless while the will they won't they get caught being so limply utilized its hard to care. No part of the film achieves beyond a shrug reminding me of Zedz's criticism against Lust, Caution as too much caution and not enough lust.

Salvador
Fear and Loathing in South America would probably be a better title for this though it tries too hard to make Woods, in a great performance, a likable presence and Belushi is just awful. Some of the appropriations of Battle of Algiers seems really inappropriate and clumsy too leaving the whole experience underwhelming which is not something I thought I could say about a film featuring a mountain of corpses. The problem is probably that the political goals of the film run severely counter to its narrative aims which are also more ordinary.

Rambo: First Blood Part II
The only real shocker this piece of Reagan era propaganda serves is that Jack Cardiff shot it. How did this group accomplish that? The film really uses that to its advantage even as every other visual aspect seems to be working against Cardiff (Stallone's getup in the first act is very silly and unexciting visually while the rest of the film is various shades of green and brown). That said even Cardiff can't resist Stallone fetishism which even more than Reagan apologia seems to be the film's primary concern with fragmented closeups of his roided out body appearing even when it doesn't make sense and him remaining the center of shots where the primary action is elsewhere. It usually works though in an over the top cartoon fashion with the scenes of action being well done if cheaply presented (no one could have made the plane scene work and the corpses are all clearly dummies). It makes me think that this film must play well to those who can speak no english. The film is far from great and the politics are nothing but an embarrassment, but they're far less omnipresent than I expected allowing for a mild quality to be sustained.

[domino harvey]

I see I rated Aimee and Jaguar four stars on Netflix and yet I remember virtually nothing about it except that I've seen it and that I'm in no rush to see it again-- I guess I still liked it, though!

[knives]

I can definitely see it becoming one of those films I don't remember anything about, but basically getting a sense of enjoyment from the memory of. Now though it's just such a bore which generally seemed to be the mood for these last few films it seems.

[Dr Amicus]

The Big Blockade (Charles Frend, 1942)
Now, this is a slightly odd one amongst Ealing's wartime feature output. Under Balcon, the studio definitely went for a more documentary style aesthetic - perhaps not surprising as many of the production team were ex-GPO team, notably Cavalcanti who is credited as Associate Producer. Indeed, the film as a whole feels rather like the GPO dramatised documentaries much more than the more traditional narrative films that made the bulk of Ealing's feature output, typified by Frend's later San Demetrio, London and The Foreman Went to France. It even includes appearances by politicians of the day and Quentin Reynolds as themselves.
The film covers the economic blockade of Germany, and ties in much of the military effort into this as we are shown different strands covering land, sea and air. The last of these is the most traditional, following a bomber crew on a mission to bomb factories - and features the almost obligatory Little Johnny Mills. It's used almost as a framing narrative in that it opens and closes the film, and is perfectly functional. The naval strand is more interesting, with Will Hay as a captain explaining the Navigation Certificate system to his assistant before being attacked by a German plane. This is effectively just an info dump - Hay coming close to Basil Exposition territory - but he is such an entertaining presence, and the whole subverts the expectation that he is just an incompetent blowhard, that it's actually quite fun. The most entertaining sequence though has Robert Morley as a district commander, terrorising local factory owners with threats of Dachau if they don't increase production to (presumably impossibly) high levels. It's a really blackly comic sequence and makes fantastic use of Morley, a performance that is a combination of camp boredom and really powerful menace that is genuinely effective, and is the highpoint of the film.
It's not essential in the way that many other Ealing films are, and not in the same league as Frend's San Demetrio, London or his postwar The Cruel Sea, but is interesting.

[domino harvey]

A little over a week left and zero lists submitted... hopefully y'all are just waiting til you see the whites of the eyes of, uh, who do we make fun of anymore? Mubi? I look forward to revisiting this thread in the future as I get through my massive backlog of War-themed films, I just got burnt out after a while (as I often do in these things) and the good thing about the Genre Lists as opposed to the Decades Lists is that they are set up forever for future discussion and revisitation, so feel free to join me even after the deadlines comes and goes. But make a list soon, plz and thanx

[bamwc2]

Started mine last night ad will submit today. Sorry, but sick kid delays.

[swo17]

My list is basically ready to submit but I wanted to wait to catch Sunday Dinner for a Soldier first, which I will now probably have to make room for, if only to balance out all of the harrowing devastation from every other film on my list.

[knives]

Yeah, I'm basically waiting for The Wind Rises which I'll probably get around to on Wednesday.

[zedz]

The dogs of war ate my homework.

[domino harvey]

There's no immediate rush, I won't be counting anything until the due date anyways, I'm just making sure people are aware and ready to submit and hopefully this won't be like the Musicals list where we only got nine ballots

[Mr Sausage]

There's no immediate rush, I won't be counting anything until the due date anyways, I'm just making sure people are aware and ready to submit and hopefully this won't be like the Musicals list where we only got nine ballots

Well, what the hell, I'll submit a list. I haven't been able to participate like I wanted to for a couple of reasons, so my list will be a bit woeful, but maybe it'll help give you more than 9.