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What a great play. The fact that Spielberg is making the film, saddens me.
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Because I don't like Spielberg's films. Especially anything dealing with war!
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". . . a beautiful bay-red foal called Joey with a distinctive cross on his nose that is sold to the army and thrust into the midst of the war on the Western Front. Joey's courage touches the soldiers around him and he is able to find warmth and hope. But his heart aches for Albert, the farmer's son he left behind." I'm reading this right? The HORSE'S HEART ACHES? Is this going to be a motion-captured digital horse acted & voiced by Tom Hanks? Just from the bare-bones decription, it sounds like Spielberg of old. If "E.T." was "a boy and his dog," then this could wind up being "a horse and his boy." Okay, who wants to make the first EQUUS joke? (Should be a great score, though . . .)
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Interestingly, I feel totally the opposite. That is, Spielberg is my LEAST favorite Director, and I wish he'd QUIT making movies, period. Then leave this project to someone else.
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WAR HORSE is reported to be great theatre, because of exactly that: it's a tale about people and animals, but with people enacting the animals. EQUUS was a similar exploration. However, the stage versions are powerful because of the theatricality. EQUUS in particular had dimensions as a stage presentation that were simply not possible in its film incarnation. On stage, the psychiatrist describes how the boy strips and strokes the horse. But, what you actually saw was the actor playing the boy stripping and stroking a tall, muscular man, wearing a stylized wire horse mask, and standing on metal platforms with metal hooves attached. The sexual innuendo was palpable. In the movie version, however, you saw a boy stroking a real horse, with none of the attendant double meanings, or theatricality. Spielberg might as well do another remake of BLACK BEAUTY... Because if he does this, which is probably doubtful, since he seems to be continually announced for any number of unrealized projects, he'll make it into another boy-and-his-horse movie, though with wartime overtones, kind of like SAVING PRIVATE BEAUTY....
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I do!
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The story is positively not an issue here!
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Dont take this the wrong way, but since Spielbergs WW2 projects are considered to be amongst the best and most realistic (Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Schindlers List)....what type of war movies do you like? John Wayne? fake war movies? Personally, I found "Ryan" to be frustratingly fake in its very concept, and made all the more phony by its painstakingly realistic approach to the battle scenes. I was horrified when I was supposed to be, all right, but found that the whole thing rang sort of hollow. Putting the words of Abraham Lincoln, one historical figure, into the mouth of General Marshall, another historical figure, in an attempt to rationalize the stupefyingly implausible concept of sending a squad of men in search of one man who gets to go home to mama, right in the middle of the biggest, most important invasion of the war, was the ultimate insult -- just made it all too dumb, dumb, DUMB, no matter how beautifully shot it was. Spielberg should have committed a TRUE World War II story to film -- it's not like there weren't enough of them. It would have been a much more suitable tribute to his father and that whole generation. To me, "Brothers" felt a little like an apology for "Ryan," and seemed a more worthy contribution to the war film genre as such.
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I hate war films, but from my perspective, Coppola and Stone run circles around Spiely in this department.
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