What up yo.
I was catching up on a few new trailers last night & I went on over to HD-Trailers.net, which I consider to be the best source for high definition trailers on the net, & I caught this trailer.
It rocked my face off.
The film is called “Stalingrad”. It’s a Russian film, made on a budget of $30 mill, shot digitally (5K source) for IMAX 3D…the visuals look absolutely gorgeous.
$30 mill.
Dude.
Michael Bay couldn’t shoot this exact footage for $150 mill, and the film makers here made it work.
Now, I haven’t seen the film…I can tell you that I read up on it…it was released in Russia last year and made double it’s cost…but has taken criticism for being hollow, a Russian “Pearl Harbour“. The film focuses on the historic 5 month battle between the Nazi’s and Russians in which 1.5 to 2 million lives were lost, was the bloodiest and most destructive battle in recorded history and which the Russians won. This is considered to be the turning point in World War II…the Russian victory here would fracture the German army and lead to its ultimate defeat. Thank God.
Everything you see in the paragraph above I pretty much learned in the last 2 hours by the way from, amongst other sources, Wikipedia.
• Random Thought:
The world should band together and give Wikipedia an award of some sort which recognizes it as being an excellent source of information and the most invaluable resource to come out of the digital age.
I went to a few other sites on the film, it focuses on a romance between a band of Russian soldiers who take refuge in a house where 2 German women have been hiding…refusing to leave. Some critics say only the battle scenes were great and the romance seemed forced slowed it down.
Now just what I see in the trailer alone looks like $200 mill was spent. And making $30 mill look like $200 mill is an achievement in itself.
In the end, i’m not going to allow these points of view to detract from my desire to see the film.
Never do.
And I’ll reserve throwing absolute praise at the film until I have seen it in its entirety.
But from the footage in the trailer above,
and then the footage and music in the trailer below…
hard, dark and pulsating version of Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World“…
That is enough for me to declare that this baby wreaks of high octane gasoline.
Have a great night people,
and don’t forget…the Oscars are fixed.
Any award show where the winner stands to profit millions of dollars is corruptible.
The Academy Award has the distinction of being the crème de la crème of film awards. However more often than not, film excellence is not rewarded…playing the Hollywood game is.
The truly innovative films, film makers actors and actresses who don’t play by the rules, who prove to be too radical minded to be considered safe and sound representatives of the billion dollar empire that is Hollywood…
In short, the figures who don’t prove to be sound investments, which is what the Academy Award is…an investment…those people and their films, performances…their art…are snubbed.
They get invited to the show and get blatantly ignored, passed over, year after year.
They claimed “Dances With Wolves” was a better picture than “Goodfellas”, that “Forrest Gump” was a better picture than “Pulp Fiction”, they didn’t recognize “Malcolm X” as the best picture of the year, they never gave an Oscar to Alfred Hitchcock…
The list goes on and on.
Anyway.
The show is fixed. Keep it in mind.