Miracle at St. Anna chronicles the story of four black American soldiers who are members of the US Army as part of the all-black 92nd Buffalo Soldier Division stationed in Tuscany, Italy during World War II. They experience the tragedy and triumph of the war as they find themselves trapped behind enemy lines and separated from their unit after one of them risks his life to save an Italian boy.

Miracle at St. Anna (2008) - Synopsis

Miracle at St. Anna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Miracle at St. Anna trailers and video clips on Yahoo! Movies

Miracle at St. Anna

Looks there are going to be some white people in the move! Wait...... so far it looks like just SS and Italians from the photos so far LOL And the traditional US M3 halftrack starring as the Wehrmacht halftrack!! LOL

__________________


For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

Looks amazing!!!!

You would think that after all these years and the more accurate movies that they would have been able to get some Hanomags or something similar.

__________________


For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I cant put a helluva lot of stock in anything Spike Lee taints with his touch. Moreover, the American halftrack made up to look German usually shoots a movie down for me.

__________________

Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow"
~Elie Wiesel~

Is that sarcasm I smell??

__________________

Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow"
~Elie Wiesel~

It looks ok but, it also looks like all four of those soldiers were armed with Tommyguns-which aint too accurate from the numbers of such weapons issued to even white troops. However, if this movie isn't full of racial undertones, I might go see it at a local $1 theater.

__________________
Lost are only those, who abandon themselves) Hans-Ulrich Rudel.

Same here.

__________________


For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

Oh dear - Its not just the M3s, the Germans marching into town in perfect formation, the uniforms that look like parade ground issue for 1939, the gray painted 88mm. I know these are little things but it shows inattention to detail (or maybe just a small budget). And considering the abuse he gave Clint Eastwood for supposed inaccuracies in his Iwo Jima moves its a bit rich. Maybe he's setting himself up to blame Da Man if his film bombs (pardon the pun) That said, Lee cam make good movies - Inside Man, 25th hour - even if he does go off a bit at times.

Interesting but not enough to get me to the theater. I usually do not like flicks that go back and forth between present and past and I can see this one like that. I'm not a Spike Lee fan because his flicks usually have a political message (sock it to the man) in them.

__________________

American by birth, TEXAN by the grace of GOD!

Trying to look at even recent history with our PC society enforced "rose-colored" glasses trying to judge events 65 years ago puts this movie in the "expired" bin for me.

IF I see it, it will be because I'm part of a captive audience on a transcontinental flight (and the price is right...free).

__________________
__________________________________________

“The first lesson is that you can't lose a war if you have command of the air,
and you can't win a war if you haven't.” - General Jimmy Doolittle

Hi Ike, if this is going to be one of those "back-n-fourth" movies, i'm not going to see it. I too can't stand those kind of movies.

__________________
Lost are only those, who abandon themselves) Hans-Ulrich Rudel.

'Miracle at St. Anna': Spike Lee's WWII Drama

The director's latest takes an insider's look at a segregated squadron




BATTLE READY (From left) Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Derek Luke
David Lee



By Clark Collis
Clark Collis Clark Collis is a senior writer for EW






Spike Lee is at work on the opening scene of his new movie in a cramped third-floor apartment in Harlem. It's a somewhat familiar spot for the director, famous for chronicling New York City life in films like She's Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, and 25th Hour. But there are hints on this chilly January day that his latest project is a rather different beast. On the wall hangs a World War II propaganda poster featuring black boxing legend Joe Louis. He's in uniform, amid the words ''Pvt. Joe Louis says, 'We're going to do our part...and we'll win because we're on God's side.''' A black-and-white framed photograph of four African-American men sits on a corner shelf. These men, too, are in military garb and standing at attention in front of a giant American flag. Someone wandering in off the street might get the idea that the director was making some kind of war movie.
And they'd be right. Miracle at St. Anna stars Laz Alonso (Stomp the Yard), Derek Luke (Antwone Fisher), Omar Benson Miller (Get Rich or Die Tryin'), and Michael Ealy (Barbershop) as members of the U.S. Army's 92nd Infantry Division, a real-life segregated unit that fought German troops in Italy after the country had switched to the Allied side. The four men become separated from their fellow ''buffalo soldiers'' during a battle at the Serchio River and wind up in a village behind enemy lines. There they await orders while interacting with the traumatized local civilians and wary Italian resistance fighters.
Two of Lee's uncles served in WWII, and the director is clearly thrilled to put his mark on a genre that, until now, has been almost lily-white in casting. ''I loved, growing up, to see Jim Brown in The Dirty Dozen,'' says Lee, 51. ''But there's really been a bad job of documenting the contribution African-Americans made to this country.'' Still, he didn't really intend for Miracle, an adaptation of James McBride's bestselling 2002 novel, to be his next project following Inside Man. After the director scored a double in 2006 with that $89 million-grossing caper and his acclaimed Hurricane Katrina doc When the Levees Broke, he hoped to use his new box office clout to raise money for either a biopic of soul legend James Brown or a film about the 1992 L.A. riots. ''Somehow I got the crazy idea that since Inside Man was my biggest hit ever and had done boffo on DVD, it would be easier to get my next film made,'' Lee says. ''And I found out that that wasn't the case. Now, if I want to do another bank heist film? Man, you wouldn't believe how many bank heist films I got offered after Inside Man. So frustration set in. I said 'F--- it, let me go to Italy.'''

'Miracle at St. Anna': Spike Lee's WWII drama | Miracle at St. Anna | Fall Movie Preview: September | Movies | Entertainment Weekly | 1

__________________


For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

Spike Lee's WW II epic no Miracle

By BRUCE KIRKLAND - Sun Media






Spike Lee's World War II epic Miracle at St. Anna is a good movie wrapped in rags. Sadly, what could have been a handsome, poignant spectacle is diminished.
This is a story-telling problem, a question of structure and tone. The 1940s passages, the heart of the film, have great merit. The 1980s bookends do not. As a result, even my three-star rating might be too generous.
Miracle, written for the screen by James McBride from his own novel, tells a fictional story about the real-life Buffalo Soldiers. That was the name given to African-Americans in the U.S. Army's experimental 92nd Division, which fought with heroism in the Allies' Italian campaign in 1944. The institutionalized racism of the era is shown.
The film follows four archetypes -- played with skill and charisma by Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso and Omar Benson Miller -- who are separated from the main battalion and forced to fend for themselves in a Tuscan village. There they interact with Italians, including members of the resistance movement, while German troops, including an SS extermination squad that is targeting guerrillas, close in.
That part of the film is fascinating, both for illuminating the true story of the Buffalo Soldiers and for mythologizing it through the fictional four, each of whom is both flawed and heroic. Miracle incorporates elements of spiritual awakening, religiosity and cultural folklore.
Meanwhile, through relationships with locals such as an orphaned boy (Matteo Sciabordi) and a fiery woman (sultry Italian Valentina Cervi), the soldiers discover their own worth in an environment where they are accorded respect and social freedom.


With the battle action and the personal drama in balance, Lee gives McBride's vision a cinematic equivalent.
But only in the WWII passages.
The film's opening chapter is awkward. The end segment is abysmal.
In the opening segment, primarily set in New York City in the 1980s, one of the four soldiers is now a mature man working in the post office. This is the Puerto Rican-American played by Alonso.
When a man walks up to his wicket, Alonso's face sours. He pulls out a German Luger and shoots his customer dead. In horror-movie mode, blood splatters widely. War hero Alonso then goes on trial. A New York reporter -- portrayed as an incompetent idiot -- tries to pry Alonso's story out in a jailhouse interview.
Instead, we see it. The film flashes back to 1944. That core story is told, including the depiction of a massacre of 560 citizens at St. Anna di Stazzema on Aug. 12, 1944. Lee filmed the SS troops murdering the Italians in the same square where it actually happened.
To his credit, Lee also took pains to distinguish different types of Germans -- from an enlightened soldier to a despicable SS butcher -- to avoid stereotypes.
And he documented the propaganda campaign the Germans launched against the African-American troops, including broadcasts and posters that highlighted segregation issues back in the U.S.
Unfortunately, the film ends stupidly. Back in the 1980s, a segment of the film concerns the fate of the marble statue head that Alonso brought back from the war. And it suggests his own fate as a result of the murder. But the details are so garish, and the staging so ridiculous, that the last images of Miracle are less than miraculous.




http://jam.canoe.ca/Movies/Reviews/M...86336-sun.html

__________________


For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

'Miracle' takes its time

Spike Lee's World War II tale is rich in digressions.

BY COLIN COVERT

Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

There are so many opportunities to find fault with the WW II drama "Miracle at St. Anna," from its wobbly plot line to its spumoni-flavored Italianisms to its odd detours between realism and mysticism, that I'm tempted to write it off.



I found myself pondering why the filmmakers chose to dramatize certain scenes that could have been condensed to a few lines of dialogue, and why they missed the opportunity to show us some pivotal episodes in the tale. I couldn't get a handle on the scope of the film, too ambitious at 160 minutes, but too modest in scale to be an epic.
And yet I found myself happily carried along from its red-herring opening to its implausible tear-jerking conclusion. This is a 90-foot all-you-can-eat buffet table of a film, a guilty pleasure for movie gluttons.
The film starts in the 1970s with a bang, literally, as a New York mail clerk shoots a customer dead. This shocker serves as the framing device for the body of the film, which occurs during the Italian campaign in 1944. U.S. troops were segregated then, and we follow the men of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division as they spearhead a push into German-occupied territory.
Director Spike Lee can't resist dialogue that feels like it came from the opinion column of a Harlem newspaper, but he's at the top of his game in these tense early combat scenes. As the so-called Buffalo Soldiers make their cautious advance, Lee swiftly sets up the logistics of the battle, the personalities of a few key GIs and the horrific consequences of flesh meeting shrapnel. After a maneuver botched by an incompetent white commander strands four black soldiers behind enemy lines, they take shelter in a hillside Italian hamlet about to be deluged with German reinforcements.
Pvt. Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), a gentle giant, befriends a shell-shocked 9-year-old (Matteo Sciabordi), who conducts one-sided conversations with his dead playmate. Noble Sgt. Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke) and opportunistic Sgt. Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy) spar over the village beauty (Valentina Cervi), who conveniently learned English as a nanny.
Cpl. Victor Negron (Laz Alonso), the team's radio operator, relays orders from headquarters to stay put and kidnap a German soldier for interrogation. The film is ostensibly a flashback of Negron's experiences, but the vantage point shifts capriciously between the Army men, the local partisans, and top brass on each side of the battle lines.
Cinematographer Matty Labitique's Tuscan locations sear your eyeballs with beauty. The film's MacGuffin -- the dramatic item that ties all the action together while being meaningless in itself -- is a beautiful statuary head that survived when the Germans dynamited a centuries-old bridge in Florence. (That's one of those potentially great scenes the film frustratingly omits.)
Pvt. Train carries the head in a mesh sack tied to his belt, and its relationship to the post office shooting moves the story through a brutal SS massacre, a romantic rivalry, art history, a genuine miracle and courtroom drama.
The film takes longer than it needs to get where it's going, but there's a juicy richness to its digressions that makes it entertaining.
While the screenplay takes pains to show that not all German troops were monsters and some American racists were, it's told in the sentimental ethnic stereotypes of wartime Hollywood. Italian men gesticulate when they talk and their daughters are earthy, sensual creatures who parade in front of GIs topless and unembarrassed. Germans rarely speak when they can sneer. New Yorkers communicate largely through wisecracks.
"Miracle" is far from the sensitive racial politics Lee is capable of delivering. But darned if it isn't rousing good fun.


'Miracle' takes its time | Kansas.com

__________________


For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

Spike Lee Goes To War

By RICHARD CORLISS Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008


The director on location in Tuscany for Miracle at St. Anna, his film about black soldiers in World War II.




Miracle at St. Anna opens with images of John Wayne and his men in the World War II movie The Longest Day flickering on a TV screen in harsh black and white. Make that all white. An elderly African American (Laz Alonso) stares at the TV and murmurs, "Pilgrim, we fought for this country too."


More Related

• Iraq War Films Focus on Soldiers
• When Antonioni Blew Up the Movies
• 9/11 in Toronto

Earlier this year, Spike Lee picked a fight with Clint Eastwood over the lack of black soldiers in Eastwood's Iwo Jima films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Clint opined that "a guy like that should shut his face"; Spike replied, "The man is not my father, and we're not on a plantation either." No doubt that Lee was voicing a social grievance, but he was also tub-thumping some early publicity for his own WW II film--the one with the John Wayne clip and the typically smoldering Spike Lee quip.
With 20 features since his 1986 debut She's Gotta Have It, plus music videos, excellent documentaries like 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke and, not least, his Nike commercials with Michael Jordan, Lee is more than just film history's leading black director. He has raised racial awareness, and hackles, while establishing a powerful brand name: Spike Lee. From the incendiary Do the Right Thing in 1989 to his box-office hit Inside Man two years ago, Lee has fashioned an ornery, instantly recognizable personality that stamps his films, his clothing line and his public statements. All seem like variations on the Mars Blackmon character he played in She's Gotta Have It: fresh, feisty, indefatigable.
In doing so, Lee, 51, has become one of three New York directors--all diminutive, all accomplished--who are so well known, and whose movies constitute such a vivid collective biography of the city in the late 20th century, that strangers seeing them on the street are likely to hail them by their first names: "Woody!" "Marty!" "Spike!"
A Producer of Genius
Allen and Scorsese have their Oscars. Lee has never been nominated for Best Director. Granted, he's not quite in their league, though he loves zippy tracking shots as much as Scorsese, and the New York Knicks as much as Allen. But Lee is a producer of genius, and not just in his self-marketing--which, don't knock it, is a boon to someone who's essentially an independent auteur. He chooses provocative projects, gets big stars when he needs them, makes vigorous, good-looking films and does it on half a Hollywood budget.
All the money is on the screen, and so are his prickliness and passion. Tender, angry, unafraid of mixing comedy and sentiment, Lee's pictures bulge with so many ideas, they're hard to contain. Sometimes he holds them together through sheer nerve, as in the loopy racial satire Bamboozled; in other films, like Do the Right Thing, the story eventually explodes in the moviegoer's face. All the audience can expect is to be lectured, hassled and entertained.
That's the case with Miracle at St. Anna, an unwieldy epic that leapfrogs four decades and two continents while trying to cram the undertold history of black soldiers in World War II into a fable of the friendship between an Italian boy and his "chocolate giant." At more than 2 1/2 hours, it's a mess, but it's got battle scenes that thrill and horrify and a brilliantly choreographed slaughter of Italian innocents; the title could have been Massacre at St. Anna.
Based on James McBride's novel and screenplay, the movie begins in 1983 with Hector Negron (Alonso), a New York City postal worker, standing behind his caged-in window at the post office. When a man approaches and asks for a stamp, Negron shoots him dead with a German Luger. Later, in Negron's apartment, police discover the head of a priceless statue. The rest of the film, a flashback to Italy in 1944, explains how Negron got the statue and why he executed the stranger.
Negron was a member of the 92nd Infantry Division, the black GIs known as Buffalo Soldiers. Their white captain sends them on a suicide mission against the Nazis, but four of them--Corporal Negron, Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), Sergeant Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy) and Private Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller)--make it across a river and into a remote village. There they fend off the Germans and mix with the locals, especially the fierce Renata (Valentina Cervi), the crafty Partisan Rodolfo (Sergio Albelli) and 8-year-old Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), whose life Train saves.
Too Much and Not Enough
Within each Spike Lee movie, a dozen different films are fighting to get out, and the best one doesn't always win. Miracle at St. Anna lugs its central narrative around much as Train does the statue head. And just as he rubs it for good luck, so Lee hopes the bonding of slow, sweet, huge Train and little Angelo--a kitschy mix of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Charlie Chaplin's The Kid--will propel audiences through the screeds on racism and the disasters of war.
Yet these are the strongest sections: a seductive broadcast by the Nazis' Axis Sally to the black soldiers; a vignette of the soldiers at a Louisiana restaurant run by a rancid racist; a montage of the Italians, the Germans and the Americans before battle, saying the same prayer in three languages; a shot of corpses in the river, one helmet floating from body to body; and the final shoot-out with the Nazis, where sudden death is both surprising and inevitable.
"This is a white man's war," the cynical Cummings notes. "Negroes got nothin' to do with it." Yet it becomes their war when they're in an isolated village with mostly sympathetic Italians. The men certainly can't be indifferent to the atrocities visited on their hosts. One such scene (based on fact, like much of the novel and the movie) leaves the viewer in numbed bereavement. As Negron puts it, "They killed so many, they ran out of bullets. They burnt so many, they ran out of fuel."
By the end of St. Anna, Lee and McBride have laid on so many miracles, the moviegoer runs out of patience. The film goes for broke and in the process breaks. It's too much and not enough. One could find a perfectly good movie, of normal length, by watching St. Anna on DVD and skipping the awful chapters to focus on the terrific ones.
But that's a familiar test, or trap, in a Lee film. He loves to twist a picture out of shape, daring the audience to keep up with the abrupt shift of moods, the wagging finger of the director. And if you start arguing with Miracle at St. Anna, that's O.K. with him. Spike Lee has always loved a good fight.

Spike Lee Goes To War - TIME

__________________


For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.