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War Horse (with Joey and....Jeremy Irvine as Albert)

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Aloysius J. Gleek:


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Ru9Y9Xwjg[/youtube]


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9menjcCtSc[/youtube]


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofqp32rgtzw&feature=relmfu[/youtube]


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvpZenYlEs&feature=relmfu[/youtube]


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7cskBYCoyE&feature=related[/youtube]


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4jU9jS6Wpc&feature=relmfu[/youtube]


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow4Rv4-bj4M[/youtube]
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Aloysius J. Gleek:


















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Aloysius J. Gleek:


http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/movies/war-horse-directed-by-steven-spielberg-review.html?partner=rss&emc=rss



Movie Review
NYT Critics' Pick
War Horse (2011)
Innocence Is Trampled, but a Bond Endures

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: December 22, 2011


Jeremy Irvine in "War Horse," directed by Steven Spielberg.


There is no combat in the early scenes of “War Horse,” Steven Spielberg’s sweeping adaptation of the popular stage spectacle, but the film opens with a cinematic assault as audacious and unsparing as the Normandy landing in “Saving Private Ryan.” With widescreen, pastoral vistas dappled in golden sunlight and washed in music (by John Williams) that is somehow both grand and folksy, Mr. Spielberg lays siege to your cynicism, bombarding you with strong and simple appeals to feeling.

You may find yourself resisting this sentimental pageant of early-20th-century rural English life, replete with verdant fields, muddy tweeds and damp turnips, but my strong advice is to surrender. Allow your sped-up, modern, movie-going metabolism, accelerated by a diet of frantic digital confections — including Mr. Spielberg’s just-released “Adventures of Tintin” — to calm down a bit. Suppress your instinctive impatience, quiet the snarky voice in your head and allow yourself to recall, or perhaps to discover, the deep pleasures of sincerity.

If you can fake that, the old Hollywood adage goes, you’ve got it made. But while “War Horse” is, like so many of Mr. Spielberg’s films, a work of supreme artifice, it is also a self-conscious attempt to revive and pay tribute to a glorious tradition of honest, emotionally direct storytelling. Shot the old-fashioned way, on actual film stock (the cinematographer is Mr. Spielberg’s frequent collaborator Janusz Kaminski), the picture has a dark, velvety luster capable of imparting a measure of movie-palace magic to the impersonal cavern of your local multiplex.

The story, in its early chapters, also takes you back to an older — you may well say cornier — style of entertainment. Joey, the fleet-footed, headstrong half-Thoroughbred of the title, is purchased at auction by Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), a proud and grouchy Devon farmer with a tendency to drink too much. His household includes a loving, scolding wife, Rosie (Emily Watson); a cantankerous goose; and a strapping lad named Albert (Jeremy Irvine), who forms an immediate and unbreakable bond with Joey. The teenage boy trains the horse to pull a plow and together they ride through the stunning scenery.

But this pastoral is darkened by memories of war — Ted fought the Boers in South Africa, an experience so terrible he cannot speak of it to his son — and by social divisions. The Narracotts are tenant farmers at the mercy of their landlord (David Thewlis), and if “War Horse” pays tribute to solid British virtues of decency and discipline it also, like a Thomas Hardy novel, exposes the snobbery and economic oppression that are, if anything, even more deeply rooted in that nation’s history.

So it is not entirely a simpler, more innocent world that is swept away by the war but rather a way of life whose contradictions are as emphatically presented as its charms. And what follows, as Joey is taken across the English Channel to the battlefields and trenches of Flanders and France, is a nightmare of cruelty that is not without its own sinister magic. Like most movies with an antiwar message, “War Horse” cannot help but be enthralled by the epic scale and transformative power of military conflict. “The war has taken everything from everyone” — the truth of this reckoning, uttered more than once by characters on screen, is self-evident, but it is complicated by the visceral charge and cathartic relief that an effective war movie gives to its audience.

The extreme violence of the slaughter in World War I is implied rather than graphically depicted. Mr. Spielberg steps back from the bloody, chaotic naturalism of “Saving Private Ryan” — this is an animal fable for children, after all, with echoes of “E. T.” and Carroll Ballard’s “Black Stallion” — but his ability to infuse action sequences with emotional gravity has hardly diminished.

An early battle scene dramatizes the modernization of warfare with remarkable and haunting efficiency. A British cavalry unit attacks a German encampment, charging through the enemy ranks with swords in what appears to be a clean and devastating rout. But then, at the edge of the field, the German machine guns begin to fire, and the British horses crash into the forest, suddenly riderless and instantly obsolete. Joey, who of course never sought out heroism in the first place, is relegated to a life of brutal labor that seems fated to end in an ignoble death.

He is kept alive by instinct, human kindness and the companionship of a regal black horse named Topthorn. Joey’s episodic journey takes him from British to German hands and back again, with a sojourn on a French farm owned by an elderly jam-maker (Niels Arestrup) and his young granddaughter (Celine Buckens).

Albert, meanwhile, makes his own way to the war, and his and Joey’s parallel experiences — harrowing escapes, the loss of friends, the terror and deprivation brightened by flickers of tenderness or high spirits — give the story texture and momentum, as well as giving Mr. Spielberg an opportunity to show off, once again, his unmatched skill at cross-cutting. (The large cast, mostly British and almost entirely male, acquits itself admirably, with a few moments of maudlin overacting and many more of heartbreaking understatement.)

Mr. Spielberg and the screenwriters, Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, have wisely avoided attempting to reproduce the atmosphere and effects of the stage production, in which Joey and the other horses are portrayed by huge puppets. He prefers to translate the tale, which originates in a novel by Michael Morpurgo, into a fully cinematic idiom. And “War Horse” turns out to have a central Spielbergian theme — perhaps the dominant idea in this director’s body of work — namely the fraught and fascinating relationship between the human and the nonhuman.

What do they — sharks, horses, aliens, dinosaurs, intelligent machines — mean to us? What are we supposed to do with them? The boundary can be hard to maintain: sometimes, as in “E. T.” and “A. I.,” nonhuman beings are virtually impossible to distinguish from humans; at other times, as in “Amistad” and “Schindler’s List,” self-evidently human beings are denied that status. Sometimes the nonhuman is a threat, at other times a comfort, but it always presents a profound ethical challenge based in a stark existential mystery: Who are we?

Mr. Spielberg’s answers to this question tend to be hopeful, and his taste for happy, or at least redemptive endings is frequently criticized. But his ruthless optimism, while it has helped to make him an enormously successful showman, is also crucial to his identity as an artist, and is more complicated than many of his detractors realize. “War Horse” registers the loss and horror of a gruesomely irrational episode in history, a convulsion that can still seem like an invitation to despair. To refuse that, to choose compassion and consolation, requires a measure of obstinacy, a muscular and brutish willfulness that is also an authentic kind of grace.

“War Horse” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The violence is intense and upsetting, though not especially gory by present-day standards.

WAR HORSE

Opens on Sunday nationwide.

Directed by Steven Spielberg; written by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo; director of photography, Janusz Kaminski; edited by Michael Kahn; music by John Williams; production design by Rick Carter; costumes by Joanna Johnston; visual-effects supervisor, Ben Morris; produced by Mr. Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy; released by DreamWorks Pictures and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes.

WITH: Emily Watson (Rosie Narracott), David Thewlis (Lyons), Peter Mullan (Ted Narracott), Niels Arestrup (Grandfather), Tom Hiddleston (Captain Nicholls), Jeremy Irvine (Albert Narracott), Benedict Cumberbatch (Major Stewart), Toby Kebbell (Geordie Soldier), Celine Buckens (Emilie), Rainer Bock (Brandt) and Patrick Kennedy (Lieutenant Waverly).

Aloysius J. Gleek:


http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2011/12/war_horse_review_steven_spielberg_s_corny_equine_drama_breached_my_emotional_defenses_.html



All the Weepy Horses
Steven Spielberg’s corny, saccharine War Horse
breached my emotional defenses.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Dec. 23, 2011, at 7:07 AM ET


Jeremy Irvine in War Horse


Steven Spielberg’s War Horse  (DreamWorks), a deliberate throwback to a long-dormant style of unabashedly sentimental Hollywood filmmaking, is so completely what you would expect it to be that it comes back around and transcends its own clichés. In this 146-minute WWI epic, there are plucky tenant farmers and sneering, oppressive landlords. There are idealistic youths whose character is tested by the crucible of war. There is, my right hand to God, a comic-relief goose. Above all, there are horses, those animals whose kinetic grace seems intimately bound up with the history of cinema, from Eadweard Muybridge’s racehorse photographs to John Ford’s equine-crisscrossed landscapes.

If you don’t thrill to the site of a horse galloping across a green meadow with a beautiful young rider on its back—if you believe (wrongly) that National Velvet  is just a sappy kids’ movie—then you may not be susceptible to the curious power of War Horse.  Granted, this Spielbergian take on the horse epic doesn’t seem destined to become an enduring classic a la National Velvet.  It lacks that film’s earthy humor and the specificity of its characterizations—not to mention that Jeremy Irvine, the perfectly adequate actor who plays the horse-mad teenage hero Albert Narracott  is no young Elizabeth Taylor. But like National Velvet, War Horse —based on a children’s novel and a play of the same name—is a love story about the bond between humans and animals that somehow sneaks past the viewer’s emotional defenses. One minute, you’re rolling your eyes at its corniness; the next, you’re discreetly dabbing at those same eyes with the back of your hand.

Writing about Spielberg’s other big holiday release, The Adventures of Tintin,  I asked whether the director’s fascination with 3-D motion-capture gadgetry might be getting in the way of his usual knack for storytelling. With War Horse,  Spielberg is back in his comfort zone. Unlike the manic Tintin,  this film unfolds at a rustic, contemplative pace that complements the boy-meets-horse storyline.

The film begins with Joey, a rambunctious, untrained half-thoroughbred, passing into the care of Albert’s father Ted (Pete Mullan), a homesteading farmer in rural England in 1914. Ted is a good man but something of a failure—he’s been an alcoholic since returning from the Boer War, where he won a medal for participating in what’s suggested was an atrocity. When he comes home with an expensive racehorse rather than the plow-pulling draft horse he was supposed to buy, Ted’s practical wife Rosie (Emily Watson) insists that the animal be returned. But their son Albert (Irvine) begs to keep the horse and, with hard work, manages to tame and train it. In what’s surely the most suspenseful plowing sequence ever filmed, Albert teaches Joey to pull the plow just in time for the Narracotts’ farm to escape seizure by their landlord (David Thewlis), a miserly wretch whose son (Robert Emms) is Albert’s chief rival.

Then, to quote a line that’s used several times in the film, the war takes everything from everyone. As hostilities with the Kaiser break out, Joey is sold to a cavalry captain, played with old-school panache by Tom Hiddleston. (Albert’s goodbye to his pet may be the first occasion you’ll need that Kleenex.) Later, Joey will pass into the care of Emilie (Cecile Buckens)—a little French girl whose saccharine cuteness stands as the movie’s low point—and eventually into the cruel hands of the German army, whose treatment of animals alone would be justification for waging war on them.

Meanwhile Albert enlists as a soldier and is soon fighting alongside his former village rival in the trenches of Flanders Field. Spielberg invests considerable screen time in showing trench warfare in all its grisly absurdity: dozens of young men huddled in a warren of ditches, waiting to be sent out into a barbed-wire maze where they would almost certainly be shot to death. Like Stanley Kubrick’s great WWI film Paths of Glory, War Horse  shows how, in the senseless butchery of real-life battle, terms like courage and cowardice lose their meaning. Though War Horse  contains several spectacular battle scenes, there’s nothing remotely martial about its spirit. Just beneath the movie’s folksy sweetness lies a powerful and painful critique of war. The battle scenes show little explicit gore, but they’re plenty intense enough to make this PG-13-rated fare too frightening for young children.
 
I won’t further elaborate on the obstacles that keep horse and boy apart for the majority of War Horse.  If you plan to see the movie, you don’t want to know, and if you couldn’t be dragged kicking and screaming into a Christmas-released Spielberg weepie, you don’t care. But if the subject matter leaves you cold, I’ll make one last argument for the film on aesthetic grounds. War Horse  looks incredible; it was shot on film stock (a technology that, sadly, is fast becoming an antiquarian novelty) by Spielberg’s longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and the images have what I can only describe as a wonderful texture. They also have intense color: deep gemlike greens and reds, with black shadows out of an old master painting.

One shot near the end, a view of the road leading up to the Narracotts’ farm at sunset, is almost surreally extreme in its oversaturated beauty, like an old Technicolor movie remembered in a fever dream. (John Williams’ score, which ladles on the strings Max Steiner-style, only contributes to the impression of mid-20th-century cinematic grandeur.) This unabashedly sincere evocation of an old-Hollywood ending could be seen as a manipulative gesture on Spielberg’s part, or a loving one. How you see it may serve as a litmus test for your tolerance of War Horse,  a movie that’s manipulative and loving at the same time.

delalluvia:
I hope to go see this movie later today.

As my sister pointed out, she hopes it has a happy ending as movies with horses seldom do.  :-\

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