Sunday,
September 28, 2008
Spike Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna"
Tortures With Torturous War Movie -10 Reviews
The
ANNOTICO Report
Spike
Lee wants to set History Straight????
560
civilian men ,women, and children were massacred at
Sant'Anna di Stazzema among 400 mass killings that
were committed by German troops involving the loss of some Italian 15,000 civilians.
during the two year Nazi occupation of
Of
the 405,399 US Military killed in WWII, ONLY 773 Blacks were killed in
action (That's two tenths of one percent of U.S. total. 90% of the
500,000 Blacks that served, did so in NON Combat Roles, like Drivers,
Cooks, Clerks, Cargo Loaders.
Spike Lee
Tortures You With His Torturous War Movie
September
26, 2009
Poor Spike
Lee. Every huge
"Miracle at St. Anna "
is a bloated, muddled, indistinct, and ill-paced movie (adapted by James McBride from his
novel) that makes its 160 minutes seem like a tour of duty for the
viewer."-Austin
Chronicle
"The impulse
here is to say something about the nobility of this movie's intent or to note
that Spike Lee is one of our best filmmakers. But the first and most honest
thing to say about Miracle at St.
Anna is that it's an awful
mess."-
"Miracle is
a botch of the first order, the kind of ham-fisted agitprop that Lee would've
made in the late '80s if he'd had the budget for it?though
it still would have been more forgivably freewheeling."- Onion AV Club
"Even if you
agree that it's well past time that the historical wrongs this film illuminates
be finally righted, you can't help but wish they could have been righted with a
better film." -
"Who knows
if Spike Lee accomplished what he was trying to achieve with this excessively
long and rambling look at the Buffalo Soldiers of WW2, but if nothing else, Lee
can feel some degree of satisfaction knowing he's made a movie about as
ineffective and incoherent as Clint
Eastwood's Flag
of our Fathers." - ComingSoon
"...[T]he real subject is the
unsung heroism of black American soldiers during World War II. Given the
importance of that subject, the real mystery of Mr. Lee's movie is why it's so
diffuse, dispirited, emotionally distanced and dramatically inert."-WSJ
"It's all
too much and too little: a history lesson in institutional racism that falls
into character clichis, a human drama that gets lost
in melodramatic detours, a war movie put together by a fan rather than a
filmmaker."-
"Ultimately,
the film is an unsavory blend of the sentimental and melodramatic.... Certainly
if Lee wanted to cut the film a bit before its release, he has ample places to
begin."-
"Miracle at St. Anna, is the
first Hollywood feature to tell the story of the African-American soldiers who
fought in the
"Unfortunately,
instead of presenting the kind of hard-hitting and eye-opening historical drama
that might have been expected or hoped for, he has instead given us a bizarre
narrative mishmash that tries to simultaneously juggle any number of story
points (including a murder mystery, religious miracles, various forms of
treachery and a romantic triangle) without demonstrating any noticeable flair
for any of them." - eFilmCritic
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