Instead of a documentary, having Woody Harrelson gesticulate throughout ruins the entire experience. This film is about the suffering, the people, the dispossessed; not a bunch of Yanks grandstanding with over-the-top theatrical poses.
shareI wouldn't say they ruined everything. But I do think having the actors as narrators reading these personal diaries and memoirs between shots has affected the flow of the stories to be told, thereby making the film not as engaging as I thought it would when I watched the film. Although some might say it's the voices of the people who were there – more than just narrating diaries, I felt I was constantly being pulled out from witnessing the events. I was forced to switch between events and actors’ faces, and was conscious about the presence of actors everywhere by their voices. It has really affected the engagement of the audience at least as far as I’m concerned. I wish the director wouldn’t have taken this unconventional approach to a documentary film of such important subject. But still I recommend this film to anyone who'd like to know about the Massacre of Nanjing.
They were reading letters written by people now dead, so it seemed a good idea to have experienced actors read them. How would you have done it, then? Think about that before you criticize!
sharebluecat60, glad to see another person posting who has a brain
exactly, would it make more sense or believable for an old chinese nanking survivor to read the letters from dead white americans/germans???
i'm just glad the movie was made, if it takes a few hollywood actors to get a documentary like this into the public eye then so be it
and in the last 70 years since the Nanking incident, how many movies do the rest of you remember being made about this??? oh, do I hear none??? yeah, i'm glad they had experienced hollywood actors participating
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I think part of the problem was that they weren't actually "reading" the letters written by the deceased. They were speaking words they'd memorized and were attempting to put feeling behind it.
But how did they know which feeling to convey? They didn't- they just guessed. Granted, that was the best they could do but...
Personally I kept being bothered by the segments where the actors were portraying the foreign heroes because it seemed like it was more, "this is what I as a professional actor think this person must've felt, so this is the emotion I shall attempt to get across as I make like I'm this person in real life." I kept sitting there wondering, "is this how this person really felt back then?"
I wasn't bothered at all by the segments where the Chinese (who were children during the Nanking incident) were speaking about it because it was real. They WERE there, that was definitely how they were actually feeling. It wasn't somebody guessing about this person they'd never met/knew nothing about.
Throwing fake/make-belive person in directly next to a real person seems to interrupt the documentary's flow, IMHO.
I'm glad it was made, but I'll bet Ken Burns wouldn't have let the actors dramatize the letters. Most of his films have been people reading from letters.
Carpe Noctem!
How can you watch this film about hatred and then get on this site and start a thread also based on hatred? What is wrong with you?
shareWhoa, calm down dude. Think gring0's just saying that they didn't like the particular style of the documentary. Nothing wrong with not liking when a real person is put in next to a person TRYING to be a real person.
shareThe film would have been sooooo much better with original footage and authentic interviews only. They could have used a voice over for key western (now diseased) persons.
shareI have to agree (about the actors part, not the American part... seems to me their nationality has nothing to do with it). Most irritating was Mariel Hemingway... WAY over the top. The problem is that they were acting as if they were reenacting someone TALKING about the incident rather than READING a letter or diary. You obviously do not write the way you talk. Inserting all these stupid pauses and facial expressions for the dramatic effect and the "look at me, it's my line!" are so distracting you find yourself not even listening. Hemingway was bad enough, however, that if I had been the director I would have had a tough decision to make... recut her "scenes" with another actress or just let it go and hope it plays better on the big screen.
shareMariel Hemingway was just awful. She was like a high school drama student. She delivered each line the same way and gave a slight shake of her head while doing so. So annoying. And to think that's how she makes her living. Don't think she would be doing so if she hadn't gotten lucky as a child because of her sister and last name.
shareWell, as a grandstanding Yank, I'm sure sorry your entire experience was ruined. If you look into it, I'm sure you'll discover these actors worked for scale, as grandstanding Hollywood Liberal Yanks usually do when they're trying to help get something made that wouldn't get made otherwise.
Other than me and the five other guys who normally watch stuff like this, I can just bet the world is standing in line to see this one.
Oh, and by the way, what fine country are you from, Sir?
"I left everything, and everyone. But no one, no one has ever left me."
"American actors ruin everything."
As opposed to Chinese actors who just ruin already horrendous Chinese movies. Seriously, the most melodramatic, heavy handed films are made in China. Have they ever heard of tact? I'd hardly call the Americans tactful as whole, but at least some of their movies hold back a little. Almost every Chinese movie plays like a sappy soap-opera.
Gain some perspective gring0.
These are the same pampered self-righteous Hollywood actors who would have turned their backs on the people of Iraq and let them suffer under Saddam Hussein. The same ones who would have gladly accepted a genocide in Iraq by forcing American troops who were protecting innocent Iraqis from deliberate terrorists to leave the field.
They should have found a better set of narrators than these hypocritical bozos.