Miracle at St. Anna

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Miracle at St. Anna

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Miracle at St. Anna

John Turturro, D.B. Sweeney, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Naomi Campbell

Set in 1944 Italy, the story of four black American soldiers who get trapped in a Tuscan village during WWII.

Id: 10959001

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Miracle at St. Anna Recent Reviews
  • flixsterman
    August 21, 2009
    flixsterman
    2 hours and 40 minutes is a long time to endure a barrage of one-dimensional characters. Unlike other recent war films that vividly capture the chaos and mayhem of battle, Miracle at St. Anna seems contrived and overly scripted. This isn't combat through the eyes of sold...( read more)iers, this is a perception of combat through the eyes of a director.

    As much as I admire Spike Lee, and as much as I really (REALLY) wanted to like this film, I just couldn't. This one is far too cliche to be taken seriously.
  • JDFortuneFan
    July 5, 2009
    JDFortuneFan
    The power of this film for me was lost in the inaccuracies of the styling and slang language used by some of the characters. The slang kept me from believing it was 1944. Aside from this loss of power, the plot was great and the characters of Train and Angelo were superb. The ...( read more)film is much too long and could have played better if cut by forty minutes or more.
  • MovieGeek13
    April 30, 2009
    MovieGeek13
    Spike Lee shot himself in the foot when he criticized Clint Eastwood's two-film Iwo Jima masterpiece for not showing the role of African Americans during WW2. First off, the Japanese army didn't have any black soldiers, and second, Flags of Our Fathers does talk about how minori...( read more)ties were mistreated at this time, despite their contributions to the war effort.
    But Miracle at St Anna really is a great film, nowhere near as good as Eastwood's films, but still worthy of attention. It depicts in harrowing detail how all black soldiers were seen pretty much as Operation Human Shield throughout much of the war. Even the Germans were able to point that out to them. Lee also shows the division of black soldiers between themselves. There's a great scene where one soldier flirts with an Italian lady, and another onlooking soldier says, "People like him have set our people back almost 400 years." A little on the nose, but the line gets the job done.
    Lee has always been a very ambitious filmmaker, and here, he tries to cover the battle from all angles: the peasant Italians, the Italian renegades, the Nazis, the white Americans, and of course the black Americans. At times, the film seems to wander on tangeants, but the emotional impact that Lee is aiming for is never lost. Even as cheesy as the last sequence is, it puts the title into a lot of perspective.
  • rebvodka042099
    April 28, 2009
    rebvodka042099
    This has got to be the greatest disappointment when it comes to Spike Lee. For me, he is one of the most brilliant directors alive -he's offered cinema a plethora of masterpieces, but with Miracle at St. Anna...he misses the mark by far.

    The performances are excellent -n...( read more)o arguments there. The beginning and ending also great -just a touch of bitter satisfaction. The cultural significance also worth paying attention to and it hits several humanity chords in each person -especially the ambush scene at the end and the scene at the church.

    Despite all those, the film is literally endless. I saw it on DVD and had to stop it and resume it over the course of several days. For those who watched it in cinema it was probably a Golgotha to sustain through. Several elements could have easily been left out and still making sense. It's a movie that is self-righteous and self-important, it's extremely pointless and at the end it doesn't leave you with many things to work with. The emotional depth of some of the characters is lacking and several racial slurs are way too pretentious.

    I only rate this movie highly because of Spike Lee's direction and several components that if viewed separately are worth it.
  • irisheyes686
    April 4, 2009
    irisheyes686
    It was a little long, but it was a good story. I loved the relationship between the little boy and the solider. The ending was perfect.
  • PaulRovi1
    December 28, 2009
    PaulRovi1
    Long and boring, I wouldn't watch it
  • dfwforeignbuff
    December 27, 2009
    dfwforeignbuff
    Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Spike Lee brings the African-American wartime experience to the big screen. I have been trying to see most of Spike Lee's movies. He is America's greatest & most prolific black director/producer. This is his most mature & complex film. For those not awa...( read more)re it is a EUROPEAN FILM (much like Tarrantino Inglorious Basterds) A majority of this film is in German and Italian language with English subtitles. It is almost epic in format at 166 minutes. There is s quite a bit of introductory plot set-up; we don't get to the war movie (Italy, 1944) until the fifteen-minute mark. There's some good acting and intriguing writing in this prologue, and the corresponding epilogue that bookends the film. Plot: In the fall of 1944, four African-American soldiers find themselves caught behind enemy lines & surrounded by German soldiers. They take refuge in a small Italian village that has been temporarily vacated by the Germans. In their company in a small boy, obviously shell-shocked & feverish, who seems only to speak to his invisible friend Arturo. Tensions rise among the four men not only because of their life-threatening situation but also because two of them become rivals for the attention of an attractive young woman. When they manage to make contact with their unit, they are told to capture a German soldier for questioning & with the aid of the Italian partisans, have a candidate. What they don't realize is that there is a traitor in the partisan group, one that will have major repercussion on one of the men 40 years later. The soldiers make friends & enemies with the townspeople, which challenges the inherent racism of all involved. Lee's take on racism is unflinching in its bitterness, especially as it focuses on the segregationist thinking of white field officers and policies of our military. The plot also has a last-minute detour into magic realism. Plot adapted from James McBride's novel of the same name is by McBride himself. It isn't a bad story; Some claim that the story is written in such a false & incredible fashion that undermines the film's credibility. I disagree. The film has some plot & dialogue problems but I found it a story well worth being told. It is a story that needs to be told no matter the problems with the plot & storyline. Lee has presented us his vision & I accept it as such. (But I do agree the story is one dimensional) The movie succeeds in that it actually fulfill Lee's mission to address the absence of black soldiers from Hollywood's portrayals of WWII. It's easy to tolerate the films flaws and admire Lee's unbridled enthusiasm. There is much to admire, particularly the Italian neo-realism of the village sequences, the realistic cinematography by the great Matthew Libatique. Corresponding soundtrack is nice also! It would have been good to hear Lee discuss the choices he made in making this film, but in a seemingly bad decision, Touchstone has issued this DVD with absolutely no extras. No commentary, interviews, history, no nothing. For a film of this importance, with such historical subject matter and large and varied cast, this is simply inexcusable. The ends left me confused somewhat, but watch this movie!! It's worth it!! 3 stars
  • eoddirtybirdfan16
    December 23, 2009
    eoddirtybirdfan16
    This did not live up to its previews. I understand there was racism and bigotry in the U.S. once upon a time but Spike Lee has a chip on his shoulder and turned this story of history into a propaganda machine. Had a white man directed this, people would be outraged at the way t...( read more)he Buffalo Soldiers were depicted (cowards, hyper religious, ignorant, mutinous, undisciplined thugs). The racism and bigotry is so thick in this movie it is hard to see anything else; but when you do you see very rampant character flaws with the Buffalo Soldiers including speech that would not have been used during that time and a storyline that is hard to follow. The combat scenes are pretty good but the rest of the movie nearly put me to sleep. And the ?miracle? at St. Anna, what was it exactly? That one of the soldiers survived the onslaught, that the boy touted as Jesus reborn survived, what exactly? Perhaps that the foreigners were more accepting of colored folks than we were here in the U.S.? You can?t tell because every second you are beaten down with racism, bigotry, and intolerance. A real director needs to correct this horrible mess that Spike Lee created. And I still can not figure out the link between this story and why the guy is shot in the bank at the beginning. What?s worse was finding out after seeing this movie that survivors denounced this film and Spike Lee refused to apologize for the lies and accused Italians of not knowing their own history and said this is ?our interpretation?. Is it? Even McBride, the author of the novel, said this was fiction.
  • BInch1
    December 21, 2009
    BInch1
    At first viewing, it's too hard to get into to. Maybe on future viewings, more will be able to be said.
  • erikggrep
    November 12, 2009
    erikggrep
    In World War II there were heroes and miracles in Tuscan, Italy. In December 1983, when the elder Hector Negron is interviewed by a reporter after shooting a man at the post office and his wardrobe revealed the long-lost head of the Primavera statue, he recalls his role in the Af...( read more)rican-American 92nd Division "Buffalo Soldiers" that took safety in a small Italian village while they were caught behind enemy lines and surrounded by German troops. With him and three other soldiers is the eight-year-old Angelo Torancelli, a lone survivor of the St. Anna massacre.

    Directed by Spike Lee, Miracle At St. Anna features superior acting performances from the following cast:
    1.) Derek Luke (2nd Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps)
    2.) Michael Ealy (Sgt. Bishop Cummings)
    3.) Laz Alonso (Corp. Hector Negron)
    4.) Omar Benson Miller (Pvt. First Class Sam Train)
    5.) Matteo Sciabordi (Angelo Torancelli)

    Seeing Miracle At St. Anna gave me an excellent impression that a troubled racial minority could show their nation their strength in the military when they fight in Nazi-occupied Europe, even though they would experience growing prejudice within the unit. But there is always help within the Italian partisans, though a traitor could foreshadow a key betrayal later on. The action and war violence here moved me a lot as if they were real. I hear of the film's controversy over the portrayal of the massacre's depiction, but I know it's not much of a big deal - Spike Lee was only using history while it was based on the James McBride novel. And I don't find it all that bad, right? An epic story that I'd call it the BEST MOVIE EVER in the war genre definitely goes down in history as a film classic - so to heck with the majority of critics who disliked it.
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