I cannot say what is biggest in The Bridge on the River Kwai: Colonel Nicholson’s pride in the bridge, director David Lean‘s budget for the film, or the nationalistic stereotyping within the film.
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After the promised autonomy of the Hollywood film system had lured director Alfred Hitchcock away from Great Britain, he remade The Man Who Knew Too Much, a film he had made in his motherland in 1934. I have not seen the original British version, so I cannot compare the two films, but the later version stands among the paragons of Hitchcock’s style. The film, starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, contains several elements characteristic of Hitchcock’s work: long takes, well-wrought sets, and a serpentine plot replete with foreigners and false leads.
What makes a hero? Is it dying in the name of your country, or is it inspiring hope in the hearts of the civilians for whom you’re supposedly fighting? In what ways are soldiers sacrificed to serve the greater good? In the 2006 film Flags of Our Fathers, director Clint Eastwood attempts to answer to these questions in his exploration of the mythos behind the soldiers of the Marine Corps War Memorial. In so doing, he shows how the United States ran its own war propaganda campaigns during the 1940s and how relative a term as lofty as “hero” truly is.
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An Odyssey Through Ulysses
“It will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.”
-James Joyce
Written in a tone every bit as serious as a traditional survival book, The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks (son of the man behind “Hitler Rap“) is chock full of tips on surviving a living-dead apocalypse, should one ever occur. Brooks has done a good job of defining in broad strokes the tools necessary for subsistence in pre-, mid-, and post-apocalyptic zombie wastelands. It’s clear that he has done his research by watching every zombie movie several times before creating one scientifically similar to those in 28 Days Later and I Am Legend.