All Quiet on the Western Front

Lewis Milestone, 1930, bw (8.5*)
Best Picture (AA)
Winner of the Oscar® for best picture of 1930, this classic anti-war film is based on the novel by Frenchman Erich Maria Remarque. Ironically, in shooting this film, which is about young, idealistic German soldiers, director Lewis Milestone, also an Oscar®-winner for best director, chose to have the Germans speak English, yet the French are speaking French! go figure..

The lead role went to young Lew Ayres, just 19 at the time and with no major film credits. At times he overacts a bit, as do most actors of that era, used to making exaggerated facial expressions, a holdover from the silent film era. If you can get past the dated look of this film, and the resulting stilted dialogue, then it's actually a pretty good war epic.

There are many scenes of WW1 action that are probably close to reality. We've become so accustomed to Hollywood war films that a realistically shot war film will likely look more tame to us than celluloid war. Unfortunately the pace of the war sections are broken up by visits home, visits to wounded comrades, too much marching, and much searching for food. In short, this 150 minute film could have been under two hours with a drastic improvement in pace for the viewer.

I wouldn't call this one of the great war films by modern standards, but it's an important war film in the history of cinema, and pretty good for its era, coming soon after the first best picture winner, Wings, also about WW1, but a silent epic. This should make an interesting double feature with Jean Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, a 2002 French film about WW1, one of the most beautiful color films ever shot, about a woman's search for her fiance, missing from the front lines. We see his story in flashbacks until its conclusion.

Ranked #212 all-time on the IMDB top 250

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Ocean's Eleven

[Both versions]
Lewis Milestone, 1960 (6.4*)
In the original, we had the somewhat appealing, though often obnoxious original Rat Pack starring, of course led by Frank Sinatra as the mastermind (what else) behind robbing three casinos in Las Vegas at once. Danny Ocean, fresh out of prison, and eleven of his cronies. I think part of the appeal of that idea is that the whole group already robbed Vegas with huge salaries for being mildly entertaining on stage together, and adding Hollywood legitimacy to a criminal enterprise, based on bilking tourists at every turn.

The script had some light humor attached to an intricate robbery heist, which had a couple of plot twists along the way. Nothing terrific, just some entertaining fluff allowing Sinatra to play the gangster, and also the brains of the outfit. You had to be able to stomach Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr, and Joey Bishop in order to enjoy this heavily plotted film, but it's ok late night tv fare.

Stephen Soderbergh, 2001 (5.8*)
The curiousity here is why the remake? Other than, of course, that Hollywood never met a remake it didn't like (Vanishing Point, Bad News Bears did not need remakes, maybe Seabiscuit did). First of all, no modern rat pack. The cast assembled is George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Eliot Gould, Carl Reiner, Julia Roberts, and some unknowns, while Andy Garcia is being robbed. An affable but hardly daunting criminal group, and a waste of some Oscar-winners with little to do here - and certainly not an organized 'gang' like the rat pack.

Second, the original was hardly a classic, had no pace and plodded along until the major setup all happens at once. For the remake, the usually reliable Stephen Soderbergh updated the time, the casino names, made it the Bellagio, and two others who share that vault that they are robbing. They changed the plot, so if you're a fan of the original, it's not the same story, but you'd guess that ahead of time, else no surprises in the movie at all. There was also never a sequel to the first, thankfully, now they've already made a sequel to the mediocre remake, Ocean's Twelve - more of the same tedium, too boring to remember. This could get old very slowly, like the pace of the remake - if anything they found a way to slow down the original.

These films show what happens when they aim for the 'mass appeal audience'. The original is worth one viewing at least. As Sinatra would later say when playing solo, "I miss the boys."

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