ALL ASPECTS OF VIETNAM WAR 1959-1975

http://www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins/punishment.htm

Laszlo Kovacs, a Hungarian cinematographer who fell in love with the American landscape on a cross-country bus ride and then used light, shadow and imagination to give visual shape to seminal films like ?Easy Rider,? died on Sunday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 74.



Adrees Latif/Reuters, 2002



Laszlo Kovacs

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Columbia Pictures



In films like ?Easy Rider? (1969), Laszlo Kovacs blended a love of landscape with an innovative filming style.



His death was announced by the International Cinematographers Guild. James Chressanthis, a cinematographer who is preparing a documentary on Mr. Kovacs and his friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, said that the cause was not known but that Mr. Kovacs had earlier had cancer.



Mr. Kovacs came along in the 1960s when the old studio system was sputtering and a new independent cinema was rising. Filmmakers emerged from film schools and work on B movies to challenge traditional themes and techniques and create what has been called ?the new Hollywood,? or ?the American new wave.?



Production moved from the studios to the streets, and the new breed used small crews, lightweight equipment and innovative means of coping with low budgets. Improvisation was both artistic goal and hard necessity. In ?Easy Rider? (1969), Mr. Kovacs used a 1968 Chevrolet convertible as his camera car, making the platform for his camera from a piece of plywood on the trunk held in place by a sandbag.



In that movie, he wanted to portray something hopeful after the fiery demise of the character played by Peter Fonda. A rising helicopter delivered a panoramic view of the horizon, but only after Mr. Kovacs balanced a camera on one skid and counterweights on the other to keep the helicopter from tipping over.



In ?Five Easy Pieces? (1970), Mr. Kovacs memorably matched the color of Susan Anspach?s blue eyes and the sky. In another scene, he shot Ms. Anspach and then let his camera drift elsewhere; she scurried behind the camera and he arrived back at her face, giving the illusion that the shot had gone all the way around the room.



His tricks included using flashing lights and other techniques to create the impression of psychedelic hallucinations. His goal was to let the environment make statements about the characters. He intended for the foggy islands of the Pacific Northwest to explain the tight little family in ?Five Easy Pieces.?



Most of his major works are clustered at the start of the 1970s, including ?That Cold Day in the Park? (1969), Robert Altman?s third feature as a director, and ?The King of Marvin Gardens? (1972), which, like ?Five Easy Pieces,? was directed by Bob Rafelson. He did six pictures with the director Peter Bogdanovich, including ?Targets? (1968), ?What?s Up, Doc?? (1972) and ?Paper Moon? (1973).



His range grew wider, with credits including Martin Scorsese?s movies ?New York, New York? (1977) and ?The Last Waltz? (1978) and Hal Ashby?s ?Shampoo? (1975). Other movies included ?Ghost Busters? (1984) and ?My Best Friend?s Wedding? (1997).



Mr. Kovacs was born on May 14, 1933, in Cece, a farming village about 60 miles west of Budapest. During the Nazi occupation, he distributed flyers for the propaganda movies shown each week in a school auditorium. His pay was a free seat, and he was fascinated by the flickering images.



In 1945, he was accepted into the Academy of Drama and Film Art in Budapest, where students watched Western films surreptitiously. He was swept off his feet by ?Citizen Kane,? saying it ?changed my visual vocabulary.?



In the uprising against the Communist regime in 1956, he and Mr. Zsigmond shot 30,000 feet of film at great risk to themselves. They escaped with the film, and some of it eventually became part of a documentary a few years later.



They both bounced among odd jobs. Around 1957, Mr. Kovacs, who had arrived in the United States speaking no English, moved from New Jersey to Seattle, taking the memorable bus ride that found echoes later in ?Easy Rider.? In 1959, he took another bus to Los Angeles, where he reunited with Mr. Zsigmond.



Mr. Kovacs did movies like ?The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill? (1966), often working with the B movie producer Roger Corman. After he shot eight biker movies in one year, Dennis Hopper asked him to do another. Mr. Kovacs?s reluctance to repeat himself vanished after Mr. Hopper acted out the script. ?Easy Rider,? with a budget of $340,000, was a sensation at Cannes and made $60 million.



Mr. Kovacs is survived by his wife, Audrey, and his daughters Julianna and Nadia.



He prided himself on spontaneity. He and the other crew members had no preconceived idea where they would shoot the classic scene in ?Five Easy Pieces? in which Jack Nicholson orders a chicken salad sandwich without the chicken salad just to get the toast he wants.



?Approaching the freeway, we saw a little rise, and there was the cafe,? he said in an interview with American Cinematographer magazine in 2005. ?I think we shot that scene in two hours, and then we moved on.?

Extremly succesful a Vietnam film by O.Stone. You see serious transformation of Ron Kovic. who was keen supporter of Vietnam war. He realises all lies and himself concidered as a rubbish which remembered only on 4th of July for a day. He later knows that he has another 364 days in a year to LIVE.

The tragedy of The Killing Fields in Cambodia was an offshoot of the War in Vietnam. President John F. Kennedy had committed U.S. advisors to supporting the pro-Western government in South Vietnam against the communist regime in North Vietnam as part of the cold war policy of containing international communism.

German auteur Werner Herzog has a history of making films about singular, obsessive characters - such as his infamous works starring Klaus Kinski (Fitzcarraldo, Woyzeck) and last year's eye-opening documentary Grizzly Man. Now he returns to a subject close to his heart: the story of German-born US pilot Dieter Dengler who was shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War and spent a prolonged period of tortuous incarceration in the hands of his prisoners.



It's the second time Herzog has made a picture about Dengler, a man who he got to know well and considered a close friend until his death in 2001. 1997's Little Dieter Needs to Fly was a documentary look at the man's extraordinary story and now Herzog returns to the same situation for a dramatic version.



And dramatic it certainly is. Herzog's films usually reach a level of heightened intensity rarely produced by other filmmakers and the opening thudding scenes of Dengler's jet decimating the South East Asian jungle call to mind Coppola's Apocalypse Now. It's not the only paean to the great Vietnam war movies of the 1970s: the prison scenes are the most hair-raising since Michael Cimino's Russian roulette moments in The Deer Hunter.



To portray the hardship and anguish that Dengler faced as well as the ingenuity and durability of the man, Herzog has found his ace card in Christian Bale, who pulls off another performance that few of his contemporaries would be capable of. Bale eats maggots and snakes, is dragged along dirt by ropes, wades through impossibly thick jungle and rivers and delivers a performance equal to any of the extremes we have seen from him before. He is ably assisted by two of Hollywood's quirkiest and idiosyncratic actors in the shape of Jeremy Davies and Steve Zahn.



Despite a slightly odd climax, this is captivating stuff. The prison scenes may not be all that easy to watch, but it all adds up to a highly memorable affair.

Super couple Jodie Foster & Robert De Niro.

Indochine is set in Vietnam in the 1920?s and 1930?s when Indochina was under the waning shadow of French colonialism. It is a beautifully photographed epic love story, richly exotic but dramatically flawed, that was nominated for two Academy Awards in 1992 -- in the Best Foreign Film and Best Actress categories. Regis Wargnier directed the film and also co-wrote the script. The film brilliantly contrasts the decadence of French colonial society, thriving off its exploitation of the subjugated Vietnamese people, with the poverty and suffering of the natives. It was an age that finally passed, but not before one trauma gave way to another.

Hair is a 1979 film adaptation of the 1968 Broadway musical of the same title about a Vietnam war draftee who meets and befriends a tribe of long-haired hippies on his way to the army induction center. The hippies introduce him to their environment of marijuana, LSD, and unorthodox relationships.

In the 1970s Kazan made THE VISITORS (1972), about two Vietnam vets, who invade the house of third vet. THE LAST TYCOON (1976), his last film, was set in Hollywood in the 1930s. It was based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, adapted by Harold Pinter. Robert de Niro was a movie producer, whose character was inspired by the famous Irving Thalberg. Both films reveived mixed critics - The Visitors was considered a total failure, and The Last Tycoon "so enervated it's like a vampire movie after the vampires have left." (New Yorker) From the 1970s Kazan devoted more of his time to writing, publishing the novels THE UNDERSTUDY (1974) and ACT OF LOVE (1978). In the 1980s appeared THE ANATOLIAN (1982), AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY (1989), and Kazan's autobiography ELIA KAZAN: A LIFE (1988).

In 1983 Kazan was honoured for his Life Achievement in a Kennedy Center ceremony. When he received in 1999 the Honorary Oscar, Warren Beatty rose and applauded and Nick Nolte remained seated stony-faced. Kazan's films have earned 22 Academy Awards and 62 nominations, including two Directing Oscars. He was married three times; all his wifes were blondes. "Being Greek, blondness is my fetish," Kazan wrote in The Arrangement. In 1932 he married Moly Day Thatcher, a playwright; they had four children. She died in 1963. Barbara Loden, an actress, writer and director, whom he married in 1967, died in 1980. From 1982 Kazan was married to Frances Rudge. Elia Kazan died on September 28, 2003, at his home in Manhattan.

http://www.freebase.com/view/wikipedia/images/en_id/193415

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre#cite_note-49

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nixon-depart.png

Another important work of A.Pacula after Sophie's Choice.

Interesting.

Matthew Modine & Nicolas Cage

Sorry again. Moon Shot, 2009 does not exist in FLIXTER. I use this space.

http://www.dangerous.co.uk/programmes/programme_moonshot.asp

Later I also saw Moon. It is serious Science fiction movie. 6th Clon managed to come back Earth. The rest has been badly cheated.

Another Vietnam story related to veterans.